No celebrated aviation pioneer’s biography is complete without the following scene: dreamy-eyed tomboy catches her first glimpse of an airplane in a cornfield somewhere, maybe buys a ten-minute flight around the patch for the change in her pocket. Thereafter, her fate is sealed, her gaze ever skyward.
No doubt Amelia Earhart’s initial flight lesson was a revelation – as any first flight is to those us who go on to become pilots. But her path from little Amelia with skinned knees to AMELIA, writ large, followed a much more winding course, the destination far from certain.
Mary S. Lovell’s 1989 biography of Earhart, The Sound of Wings, points to a different defining-moment scene altogether: Earhart, a thirty-year-old Boston social worker, walked into the New York office of George Putnam, a publisher and PR genius looking for his next project: a young woman with guts, poise, and a pilot’s license whom he can mold into a star with massive earning potential. The minute he set eyes on her, he said later, he knew Earhart was just what he was looking for.
Their partnership and eventual marriage began as a story of an opportune symbiosis between brilliant salesman and eminently saleable product, evoking a more modern form of celebrity: the manufactured superstar, looks and media savvy eclipsing talent and ability, a deep pocket somewhere in the background pulling the strings. Keep in mind that during the flight that launched Earhart onto the world stage, she never once operated the controls. Two male aviators flew her across the Atlantic, making her the first woman to cross the sea by air. Courageous, but not exactly an achievement.
This is where Earhart’s path forked. She could easily have ridden this wave of easy limelight, raked in the bucks via speaking engagements, newspaper columns, and the like. But the charges that her crossing was a mere publicity stunt galled her, all the more because there was truth to them.
Instead, the latter chapters of Earhart’s well-known history tell the tale of a woman determined to actually become the accomplished aviatrix Putnam had packaged and sold to an eager world. She undertook the solo Atlantic crossing, the record-setting flights that followed, and most of all her tragic final flight not only to firmly establish her legend, but to prove to herself that she was worthy of it.
Not even Putnam could have foreseen the longevity of our fascination with Amelia Earhart. A new movie titled, Amelia (to be released on October 23, 2009 and based partially on Lovell’s just re-released biography) should serve to further stoke that fascination and the obsessive curiosity of a few hardy souls who even now search for clues that might explain her disappearance.
As for whether to ascribe Earhart’s legend more to smoke and mirrors than to stick and rudder, I’ll leave that to historians to argue. I’d rather just sit back and enjoy the rollicking good adventure tale that is her life story and whisper a quiet “thanks” to the lady who still inspires so many of us aviatrixes to take to the skies.
Kim Green is a Nashville flight instructor and writer. She recently co-translated and edited “Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front” by Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, a decorated WWII combat airwoman for the Soviet Air Force.
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