After all these years, and all those books, mystery still
surrounds the person of Amelia Earhart.
Who was this woman who dared so much so often? What drove her to take such risks, to give up
so much of herself to flying? That the
questions are still asked tells us something about her desire to keep a part of
her life away from the public's view.
She wasn't so much shy as reserved.
As time went by she realized both the rewards and drawbacks of a very
public life. The rewards were
obvious. She was a top earner on the
lecture circuit. Her books sold
well. She met and befriended some of the
most interesting personalities of the period, everyone from Will Rogers to
Eleanor Roosevelt. The drawbacks were
less obvious, but burdensome. The type
of record setting flying she did was very expensive, and as she made longer and
more difficult flights the costs ate up her speaking income quickly. She was one of the most recognizable women in
America, so there was no such thing as feeling alone in a crowd. And the crowds! She truly hated and feared the mobs of people
who wanted to touch her, even snatch at a scarf or hat as she moved through
them at the end of a flight. But what
she did was by its nature public; the animalistic mindlessness of the throngs
who pressed around her was unavoidable.
That reserve, born of an awareness she was always being
watched by people she didn't know, but who knew her, has left its own
questions. In 1992, researching what
became The Truth Of It: Amelia Earhart's Private Journal I was privileged to
speak to a number of women who were active in aviation at the same time as
Amelia. Even after forty-five years some
of them were still bitter that she had been privileged to accomplish what they
hadn't. They attributed her success to
her upper middle class background and posh social connections. A couple of them told me she was
"known" to be promiscuous. The
facts just don't support any of that.
Her dad was a talented lawyer who couldn't make a living because of his
alcoholism. She was raised by
grandparents in Atchison, Kansas, hardly a social Mecca.
Probably the promiscuousness is an after-the-fact result of
publication of her famous letter to George Putnam, given him on the morning of
their wedding. She had grave doubts about
the viability of mixing married life with an aviation career, and announced she
might need to establish a separate residence where she could sometimes go to be
alone. She also told him she wouldn't
hold him to any "medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider
myself bound to you similarly." She
demanded the right to end the marriage in a year if she wasn't happy. You have to realize Amelia was raised in what
we nowadays call a "dysfunctional" family. Her experience of marriage wasn't a joyful
one. The biggest objection to the
"promiscuous" Amelia, however, is the fact that she was watched
wherever she went, and knew it. Numerous
biographers have been unable to turn up any evidence of extramarital affairs in
her life. And they've looked. Lacking evidence, I have to agree with
them. The Amelia you read about in
history is probably the Amelia that was.
This novel available at #AmazonKindle .
This novel available at #AmazonKindle .
