Amelia Earhart was practically made for her role. In appearance, she and Lindbergh seemed like two peas from the same pod. Both were lean and shy. You could have mistaken them for brother and sister. And that paid off for her in 1928, the year after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. Philadelphia socialite Amy Guest had asked publisher George Putnam to organize a transatlantic flight in her own Fokker Trimotor. So Putnam had found a pilot to fly it. Then he’d interviewed women to find, and I quote, "[a] girl who would measure up to adequate standards of American womanhood." She would keep the flight log.
When Earhart learned about that, she did her homework. Don't be too appealing; that might cause Putnam to be protective. Don't make too much of the fact you are also a pilot; they want only a second banana. She showed up looking just like Lindbergh, kept her mouth shut, and got the job. She became the first woman to make the flight, and she stepped out of the plane into a media maelstrom that never ended for her.
Earhart was the hottest item in the papers, even if she had been only a passenger. Putnam became her publicist. He booked high-pressure speaking tours and fed stories to the press. Putnam made it hard on other women pilots. It was an odd symbiosis. He manufactured her fame, and she rode the wave until she began drowning in it.
But Earhart was driven by idealism. She’d started out, hoping to become a poet. Along the way, she learned to fly from a rare woman instructor named Neta Snook in California. By the time she rode across the Atlantic, she was a seasoned pilot, supporting herself by working as a social worker in Boston.
Then Earhart married Putnam in 1930, and it began as a marriage of convenience between two workaholics. She even made Putnam sign an agreement so she could dissolve the marriage after a year if she chose to. Still, the marriage seems to have gained in meaning as the mad whirl went on.
For nine years Putnam managed Earhart, pushing an able pilot into the limelight over better fliers. Earhart finally flew the Atlantic solo in 1932. All the while she wished she had the mind-space to write poetry, but she never had time to meet her own standards. Instead, she used her bully pulpit to push things she believed in: women's rights, pacifism, and (above all) flight itself. She was powerfully dedicated to all three causes.
Take a 1931 article in Aviation Week. Commercial flight was an established fact, but it still faced huge hurdles in its struggle to gain public confidence. Now Amelia Earhart holds the title of Vice President with Luddington Airlines. They've already flown over a half-million passenger miles between New York and Washington. And she writes frankly about the problems they face:
Airlines must learn out how to keep their schedules, she insists. Well, I guess they’re still working on that one. They'll also have to learn to manage ticket sales in a still-computerless world. And they'll have to keep their ticket prices down. She brushes off the pernicious problem of air-sickness. It afflicts only five percent of travelers. More women suffer than men, but they're more stoic about it. We see little poetry in that, but we see great influence coming to bear on the American public.
Then Earhart set out to fly around the world. If she’d made it, the flight might have been forgotten. But she vanished at sea, and we spent the rest of the twentieth century wondering what became of this complex woman, who lived in a tangle of ambiguities. Was this last flight cover for naval spying on the Japanese? One theory says that Earhart used it to vanish from the public eye so she could live out her life under another identity.
It was surely just bungled navigation. Still, the stories and arguments have hardly abated. The dropping-out-of-sight theory reflects the sad truth of Earhart’s plight. For she was shy, bright, and caught in an ever-expanding web of manufactured success. All this left me wondering what she might have said in her book of poetry.
Then I found Jane Mendelsohn’s 1996 book I was Amelia Earhart, and maybe it holds the key, for she turns Earhart’s disappearance into a metaphor. I’ll read the first three paragraphs, and hope you find them as perplexing and beguiling as I did:
The sky is flesh.
The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.
More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.
And we’re back to words -- lyrical words, even musical words. Miguel de Cervantes put a wonderful cry in Don Quixote’s mouth. It was “Facts are the Enemy of Truth!” Well, to understand Earhart’s story, is to understand her legend at a level beyond mere facts. Of course she still lingers forever, off on some south sea island. Her story is Icelandic saga. It’s Greek tragedy. It’s opera.
Let’s look at flight through another set of eyes. Roger Kaza, of our Houston Symphony, has noticed something quite intriguing about another breed of writer, musical composers. He’s noticed an eerie fact about the way they all tell the story of flight.
Sources:
A. Earhart, The Fun of It. (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932).
A. Earhart, Last Flight. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1937). (George Putnam pieced this account of Earhart's last flight together from her telegraphed dispatches and published it a scant five months after her disappearance.)
V. V. Loomis and J. L. Ethell, Amelia Earhart: The Final Story. (New York: Random House, 1985).
M. S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989).
S. Ware, Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993).
Special Collections at Purdue University maintains a George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/spcol/aearhart/
O. Wright, The Future of Civil Flying; A. Earhart, Putting Air Travel into Mass Production; and other reprinted material from older issues of Aviation Week and Space Technology, Vol. 135, No. 6, August 12, 1991. See especially p. 61 and pp. 108-111.
T. D. Crouch, Searching for Amelia Earhart. Invention and Technology, Summer 2007, pp. 44-53