Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of the new book "The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam and the Marriage That Made an American Icon" was today's guest. She discussed how Earhart shaped how we travel today, why she is still such a potent role model, and what happened to her on her final flight.

Takeaways:

• The contemporary travel industry owes much of its development to the pioneering efforts of early aviators, particularly Amelia Earhart, who significantly influenced public perception of air travel.
• Laurie Gwen Shapiro's book, 'The Aviator and the Amelia Earhart,' delves into the intricate relationship between Amelia Earhart and her husband, George Putnam, showcasing their collaborative efforts.
• Amelia Earhart's role as an ambassador for aviation was crucial in promoting air travel to women, thereby helping to establish the industry as a viable mode of transportation.
• The podcast highlights the complexities surrounding Amelia Earhart's legacy, suggesting that her ambitious nature and calculated risks played a significant role in her untimely demise.
• Listeners are encouraged to explore the nuances of Amelia Earhart's final flight by listening to tapes of those who know her, available on the Smithsonian website.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Smart Travel Podcast

And welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

I'm your host, Pauline Fromer.

When you think about the history of the contemporary travel industry, there are few bigger names than Amelia Earhart.

Which is why I'm so thrilled to have the author of what I would consider the definitive book on that extremely famous aviatrix on the line.

She is Lori Gwen Shapiro.

She has a wonderful book out.

It's called the Aviator and the Amelia Earhart, George Putnam and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.

Hey, Lori, welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

I am so thrilled.

I'm a big fan of yours and I'm really delighted to be here today.

Well, it's mutual.

I'm a huge fan of yours and this book.

I wanted to talk about it in the context of the travel industry because I think a lot of what we think of as normal in terms of getting hopping from place to place by airplane was built on the blood, sweat and tears and blood in bold letters of the early aviators.

Yes, I would agree with that totally.

But also I would argue, and I am Amelia Earhart's biographer, that the aviation industry as we know it today is in great deal due to Amelia Earhart's role as an ambassador as well as an aviator.

The aviation industry was based on around her time.

We're in my hometown of New York City, where you're speaking to me.

I think you are in New York as well.

Yes.

It's no longer based in midtown Manhattan.

It's moved, I believe you can correct me, onto Miami and Texas.

And Amelia Earhart at this point was already a well known figure because she had been the first passenger across the Atlantic, and she was being promoted by her manager, later to be her husband, George Putnam, as the Queen of aviation.

And what her role was after the stock market crash was to convince people to get up on airplanes.

And the way she did that is fascinating.

How'd she do it?

Well, I wanted to give you a chance to talk.

The way she did it was by going after women and saying, would you like a ride in an airplane?

That was something that she would do as a vice president for several different airlines.

She would always joke that she was always the vice president and she wasn't being hired to.

To fly people.

She was being hired to basically convince people that aviation was the future and that smart women let their husbands and their kids go on planes.

And that was going to be the faster way to get there.

And she often would do special flights with only women allowed.

And they would go up in the sky, and this worked.

People would line up, there was lots of press, and she would get people to go back up in the air at a time when there wasn't a lot of money for aviation.

And she got the ordinary person flying.

And so when I take a flight, and I've been taking many flights since my book release on July 15, Amelia Earhart really gets you on the tent.

I'm on a 30 city book tour right now.

I've been all over the United States.

But every time I see those clothes from the passenger seat, I think this is because of Amelia Earhart.

Yeah, well, she was an incredible ambassador, and she was married to a gentleman named George Putnam, who was an incredible promoter and so helped build her up so she could be this ambassador.

And a lot of the book is about that.

He started an airline that was also a train line.

Absolutely.

This blew my mind.

Can you talk a little bit about ATA or tat?

Tat.

Oh, damn.

Amelia had already got on to the American radar because she had been the first woman to cross the Atlantic again.

She was part of a reality show of sorts, which we can get into.

As a pilot, not as a passenger.

I mean, things are rosy.

People are doing crazy investments.

And this is when this new airline is launched with Lindbergh involved and Amelia Earhart brought in to.

To draw the women in as passengers even then.

And basically it would leave from New York or Los Angeles, and this was a way to go cross country.

But it took about two days.

You had to go to a hotel stop, you had to take a train.

It was like a plane, you know, it really.

It illuminates.

In New York, we have the take the train to the plane jingle that goes through my head.

But this was a different type of travel, and it was expensive.

And they had, you know, all stars doing the first flight.

So Emilio led the first flight, not as a pilot, as a passenger that left from New York's Penn Station as the first train ride.

I mean, that.

It's crazy.

And Lindbergh was Coming the other way from Los Angeles and they cross in the middle.

And it was a really amazing thing, except that aviation was still quite dangerous at this point.

There were some accidents that people didn't want to talk much about, but it also took a long time and it was tremendously expensive.

But you think about this.

I mean, it really went fast.

But the reason this took so long, this original airline, to get across country, you had to take trains because they couldn't fly in the dark.

Right.

And they only went about 100 miles an hour or 130 miles an hour.

So these were much slower planes.

And you hear about the derring do of these early aviators who made the first solo flight here or the first time hopping here.

And in your book, what you brought to life was the danger of this.

Most of them died trying to do this.

We only know about the successful ones.

But dozens of men and women perished trying to set records, but also create this as a viable form of transportation, Right?

Absolutely.

And we think we know, of course, the ending of the Amelia Earhart story in many ways.

A lot of people forget that she was with someone else, Fred Noonan, who was her navigator.

But if you go back to the 20s, aviation really gets onto the radar for the.

George Putnam, who would become Amelia's husband, was involved with giving some material.

He actually was a nephew of the head of Putnam Books and he thought that he was going to take it over.

This film becomes so popular.

He's not the first to cross the Atlantic, but he's doing it solo.

He wins a prize called the Ortier Prize.

He.

He has stripped down to a tiny plane the Spirit of St. Louis.

Other people had tried with even like living room furniture on the plane.

He's, no, I'm just gonna do this myself.

And he becomes overnight the most famous man in the world.

Now, George Putnam, who's based in New York, is a very.

I don't particularly love him as I.

As I research him, but he's very smart.

And he.

He basically uses his New York connections in midtown Manhattan, where his office is.

He races over to the Times building, which is about a block away.

And he figures out that he can give a wire to the Times editor.

The Times are the sponsors of Lindbergh's flight.

And he gets a book deal offer to Lindbergh before anyone else.

And that book, which is about his flight, called we becomes one of the great sellers of the Jazz age.

And he also.

Byrd also has another client who's another superhero at the end of the twenties named Richard Byrd, who leads an expedition to Antarctica, a plane flight.

He's not the pilot, he is the, the, the lead on the expedition.

These are the rock stars.

I mean the flapper era is really coming in the beginning of the 20s.

By the end of the 20s, the All Stars are the aviators.

And one thing that is very interesting is that Amelia Earhart's career begins with a book deal.

This is how she becomes someone who's well known.

Putnam is not going to make a bestseller out of the second person who's a man to cross the Atlantic.

That's not gonna sell books.

Sure.

What is gonna sell books is a woman who crosses the Atlantic alone.

And he gets wind of a woman named Amy Phipps Guest via, who's tried to lease a plane from Bird, his client.

And Amy Phipps Guest is the wealthiest woman in America.

She's a steel heiress and she wants to be go across the Atlantic.

Now you talked about the danger.

So a lot of women realized that there was a place for them if they were the first to go across.

And what that looked like was a lot of wealthy women trying to buy a passenger ticket, maybe funding the expedition so their lives would count.

Many of them had been born right before the suffragette movement and really just wanted, you know, the middle aged women, I mean, that were disappearing as passengers.

Some women wanted to fly it.

But when Amelia Earhart is discovered as a person who can hit a replace Phipps on this flight, her kids were not having it.

They were saying, mom, you're not crossing the Atlantic.

Why don't you with your money sponsor a nice young lady, you can get the glory and you can come to our wedding.

So not your, not Earhart's kids.

These were the kids of the heiress.

They pulled the plug on her plans.

Basically, Amy Fitz was telling Bird this, Putnam was Bird's publisher and he realized he had an in, just like he did with Lindbergh.

And he was going to help find the woman that would be a passenger across, hopefully a pilot.

And there was a bit of a search and she was discovered to be a flying Social worker in Boston named Amelia Earhart.

And so basically, the whole beginning of Amelia Earhart's public career begins with a book deal.

She had been flying in the early 20s, a little bit of stunt flying.

She learned how to fly in Los Angeles when she was visiting her parents.

They were Midwesterners who had moved there.

But she had not continued this as an avocation.

She was really pushing forward as a social worker who was a hobby pilot.

But she looked pretty wholesome.

She's a social worker.

She checked all the boxes.

And one of Putnam's colleagues, hey, doesn't she look a little bit like Lindbergh?

And they created this whole PR campaign of the Lady Lindbergh.

And she was revealed to the public as she was leaving Boston harbor, headed to Newfoundland and going to be the first passenger.

And then another woman named female passenger, of course, female passenger.

Another woman named Mabel Bol, who had money, wanted to finance her own flight and beat Amelia Earhart.

So there was a race on even then, and they're all fog bound in Newfoundland.

And everybody started to see pictures of Amelia Earhart promoted as Lady Lindy.

And she had on a helmet, she had on flying gear.

They cut her hair to look more like Lindbergh.

So that iconic hairstyle that we know was not Amelia Earhart's hairstyle going in, I mean, this was very much a PR movement.

And what happens is Amelia Earhart is the first woman across the Atlantic.

Seven women died.

It was a tremendously dangerous thing to even try that.

And she gets a ticker tape parade when she gets back with the men that actually did the flying.

And she's very embarrassed by this.

And she wants.

There's a lot of people talking.

And she decides there and then that she wants to actually try at one point to fly across the Atlantic by herself.

And she does, eventually.

And she sets a whole bunch of other records.

Even though her skills were iffy, as.

You in the book, one of the things is that, remember, she was a hobby pilot.

When she gets involved with Putnam, who is a married man.

This is not in your Scholastic book.

He begins an affair with Amelia Earhart, but Putnam's wife, Dorothy Binney Putnam, is having her own affair with a younger man.

This is the Jazz Age in the beginning.

Oh, yeah, there's a lot of tea in this book.

A lot of tea.

So don't get too.

So before you get judgmental.

But the thing that was fascinating is that she was immediately put on a book tour, a lecture tour.

Amelia Earhart was a social worker who is now wearing Mink coats.

She had sports cars.

This is still before the crash.

So this is from June of 28 until the stock market crash.

She's living a great life and she's not getting flight time.

And this is also the lap of spin.

Putnam is sort of the P.T.

barnum of publishing.

He makes things up.

Like Putnam Books is going to be blown up by fascists to get a book on the bestseller list.

This guy's a bit Machiavellian.

And he basically starts promoting Amelia Earhart above her actual ability to fly.

Right.

I am not saying that she couldn't fly.

I'm saying that she would couldn't fly as well as she was being promoted.

And I want to assure anyone listening at this point to the podcast that Amelia Earhart is a great person.

She has a lot of legacy.

We are not getting rid of Amelia Earhart, but we are just giving enough, much more nuanced portrait of a real person who's incredibly brave and at times from the get go, very reckless and very ambitious.

And that is possibly what has really been missing from the Amelia Earhart story.

That her bold ambition and calculating nature, which is not a terrible thing.

Sure.

When a person has been airbrushed and she's always said to be very modest, she's not ambitious.

Because back then as now, a lot of people do not find blatantly ambitious women palatable.

I gotta say though, yeah, I mean, that's a great thing about the book.

I mean, you really do give very nuanced multi dimensional portrayals of all of these real life people.

And we learn that maybe one of the reasons Amelia is still famous today was George Putnam, her eventual husband, who was a master, master promoter.

But on the other hand, Amelia was a real Renaissance woman.

She read philosophy, she invented.

Maybe she invented the suitcases.

We know it today putting like.

Because she did have a lot of ghost writers and ghost inventors.

What she really did do, and let's stop for a second, is that she was an incredible feminist and she really wanted to push women to do whatever they wanted to do.

And this is one of the reasons why she's also a role model.

Yes, she had the great promotion, but she was authentically a good person.

People can pick up on that now.

I will stop to say a few other names of women aviators that are in the book.

We have Eleanor Smith, who was the first.

She was 16 years old and she was rising up.

She was a New Yorker.

She was the first woman on a Wheaties box.

She was a tremendous pilot.

We have Jackie Cochran, we have other lost names.

They did not have a George Putnam.

But one of the differences between a lot of these women who were better pilots than Amelia Earhart, I'm just going to say it, they did not have this sense of pushing women forward as feminists.

And Amelia always wanted to be able to take the same risks that men were able to take.

And she also wanted to open doors.

And she was the first president of an organization called the 99s which still exists, which represents thousands of women pilots across the world.

It was originally named after the 99 first women pilots.

And this is part of her legacy.

The other women were setting records, but.

But they were not always bringing the other women along.

And Amelia was in many ways the very first influencer, partly due because of her visibility from her manager and husband, George Putnam.

But not everybody uses their influence in the best way.

And she would use every chance she could to talk about women's rights, about era, about how women should go up on airplanes.

ERA being the Equal Rights Amendment, believe it or not.

Has already was.

Already was around then.

Yeah.

And later on, again, as I said, especially after the stock market crash, she single handedly kind of props up the aviation industry.

Now that is not gender based.

She is an ambassador for all of aviation and, and people would follow her.

And she was a role model for many, many young people, especially young girls.

I know that she was my mother's hero.

My mother can't fly a plane, but she decided she should be able to do anything she wanted to do because look at what Amelia Earhart was able to do.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, when I told my 89 year old stepmother Roberta that we'd be talking, she would say, oh my goodness, Amelia Earhart was my hero growing up, you know, so.

And you think about the people who were inventors or explorers or who did dangerous things back in the 20s before then.

She's one of the few names we really still remember today.

I mean, she still has a potent.

Absolutely.

And I want to say that again that, you know, I'm saying that she's not as good a flyer as some of the other women, but there's undeniable evidence.

I mean, the fact what she was doing, she was brave, I mean, that you can't, you know, she was.

But at this point, she is the second person, man or woman, to cross the Atlantic alone.

Now, let's look at this a little closer, because she's supposed to go to Paris, like Hamburg.

She lands in a cow field in Ireland.

Her navigation skills are not great.

And she's so famous that when she comes back to America.

And at this point, Putnam has been kicked out of his own family firm because of his crazy antics.

He is now working a little bit with Paramount as a story editor.

And Amelia, as a favor, flies him.

She's her flight.

Her flight skills have gotten pretty good at this point.

She flies her husband to back to work.

They're the first.

They're.

Amelia Earhart and George Putnam had homes on both coasts.

Say they are the first bi.

Coastal family.

No doubt about that.

And she goes to Paramount and she goes to the cafeteria, and all the Marx Brothers are there, and Gary Cooper, Gary Cary Crant.

And they are just like.

Like fan kids, you know, like fan girls and fanboys.

Starstruck, right?

Like, I mean, these are the movie stars.

Seeing Amelia Earhart, who's just crossed the Atlantic, a walk into the cafeteria.

So this is how famous she was.

She could make movie stars just melt.

And she was dominating the press.

But the thing that you need to realize is that even that is old news after a while.

And the Depression is carrying on.

And the model that Amelia Earhart and George Putnam created, they are now married.

Dorothy Benny Putnam, George's first wife, had a Reno divorce.

She had a lot of the money in the family.

She was the Crayola crayon heiress.

If you've ever heard of Gideon Smith, George Putnam's been kicked out of his family firm.

And Amelia, who had been a millionaire in 28, was scammed in a sort of Bernie Madoff situation.

And her father dies, leaves her no money.

And this relationship, which began with a sexual relationship, is now a real marriage, but also a partnership.

And if you think about any listeners, how you survived the pandemic or.

Or recessions with your partner, you really have to sit down and say, how are we gonna get through this?

And Amelia and George both decided that the Amelia Earhart name was gonna be their meal ticket.

And she does an amazing amount of lectures.

This is something that will bring in money.

And the model they come up with is she will do a stunt flight and then lecture on it.

And often she is doing incredible flights, but she's taking risks that are.

Are.

Are really wild.

And I think she starts to believe her own press, that she can get away with anything.

Sort of that Evel Knievel mentality.

And this is what I try to show in the book, that George Putnam and Amelia Earhart are very reckless together as a couple.

Right, right.

Amelia is very reckless.

She's literally throwing bottles of alcohol out the window as she takes off.

And that's a mentality that we have to kind of wrap our brains around.

Like, Amelia took some really stupid risks.

Well, well, let's.

I mean, let's.

Let's talk about her final risk, which didn't pay off.

And interestingly, the White House just released the Amelia Earhart files.

They say they're going to release, or they say they're going to release them redacted files.

I will tell you, there's no there, there, Amelia Earhart.

I'm giving away the ending because my book is not how she died.

The mystery to me is not how she died.

The mystery when I began was, who was she?

How did she live?

That's what I wanted to know.

Most people that are very connected to the Earhart world know very well, including everyone in the Earhart family and the Putnam family, that she ran out of fuel, that the.

The.

The last trip, which was a not one single flight, but a.

A series of connected flights to hug the equator was a stunt flight.

They were really broke.

And so this was a flight around the equator of going to many different countries that was to land back in California, and it was to make money.

There was lots of deals lined up.

There was NBC.

There was a movie deal with Bernard Baruch, who was one of the wealthy men in America.

There was Queen Quaker Oats had a deal.

She had a book deal.

And if she made it, and she came very close to making it, George and Amelia would have had millions of dollars, and she was going to retire from stunt flying.

And a lot of her friends, including people like Louise Theden, who I mentioned before, and Jackie Cochran, were terrified for her, because one of the things you had to do was fly over a great expanse from New guinea to Hawaii over the Pacific, and she was going to stop on an island called Howland island, which was basically the size of Central park and missed it.

It was terribly dangerous.

And her friends called it a suicide mission and said.

Begged her not to do this.

And she knew how dangerous it was.

And she did not know Morse code.

She was flying with a man who was a known alcoholic who starts drinking during the trip.

Yikes.

And this is a trip that she did not have to take.

And we have to, you know, make peace with these facts.

She did.

She did not do the training.

She was on a lecture circuit at all times.

And she was not getting enough time on this plane because each time they.

Had to learn new planes as the technology evolved.

And so she needed hours, Right.

She's on an Electra 10e, which is a very different plane than her famous little Red bus, which when the government reopens, you could see at the Smithsonian.

The Vega is a really cute little red plane that she did.

It's hanging now next to the Spirit of St. Louis in a newly reopened wing of early flight pioneers that anyone can see for free at the Air and Space Museum in Washington.

But the plane that she disappears on was a very different plane, a much more sophisticated plane that she did not get enough flight time from her coach.

Paul Mance thought that she wasn't ready.

But George Putnam was looking at those book deadlines and those film deadlines and really pushed her to take off.

And they left key equipment in Miami behind, including a trailing antenna.

They had cheap radio equipment.

There were a lot of cut costs cut, including Putnam hiring Fred Noonan, who was an incredible navigator.

He was one of the men who had opened up Pan Am routes.

He was Pan Am's best navigator, but he was fired from Pan Am for his drinking.

And that's why he came very cheaply.

And that would come into play.

Audio exists of people who.

I mean, not one person making up a tall tale, but multiple people talking about how Putnam and Putnam.

Putnam, sorry.

How.

How Noonan and Amelia were not getting along at the end of the flight.

They were fine when they took off.

How drunk Noonan was that he left smoke bombs under his bed when he left that they're yelling at each other.

And so the fact that they don't know radio code becomes important because Amelia is trying to get the Morse code man.

At the airstrip in Le New guinea, there's an Australian strip.

They're doing.

They're doing flights to remove gold.

Papua New guinea at that point was part.

Was an Australian mandate.

And so Australians are on record and they.

They saw it.

And Pan Am co workers of Noonan are on the tapes.

The great women aviators like Louise Thetan and Jackie Cochran are on tape.

So I am not just guessing what they think.

Yeah, I'm actually working off of transcriptions.

And if anyone doubts what I'm saying, I'm here to say you can listen to it from your own living rooms.

Your heart project at the.

And it's Smithsonian, so it's.

It's free to listen to.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think you could just read the damn book because it's.

It's a great book, but if you're.

If you're really obsessed, go listen to the tapes, too.

Once again, we've been speaking with Lori Gwen Shapiro.

She is the author of the Aviator and the Showman.

Thank you so much, Lori.

It's been such a delight speaking with you.

Thank you for having me on.

What a treat.

And that is it for this week's show.

I thank you so much for listening to those who are traveling.

May I wish you a hearty bon voyage?

I'll see you next week.

Sour candy on the table Lazy afternoons in your sweatpants Watching cable well, it feels so far away all the channels seem the same Trying to remember all the songs we like to play?

Cause those lazy afternoons Come so frequently these days oh, it's been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the boathouse on the lake oh, but I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it takes I can't get you off of my mind Looking out the window where we spend so much of our time But I guess you can't control those damn cards with both of us are ask me when we're free but would it be so.