Shapiro’s breezy account of Earhart’s early life includes a few new details, particularly about the aviator’s relationship with an early benefactor (Shapiro calls him Earhart’s “sugar daddy”) in California: a 63-year-old billboard magnate named Thomas Humphrey Bennett Varney. Varney wanted to marry her, but she ended up accepting the proposal of a young chemical engineer from Boston, Samuel Chapman. “Amelia could have had a very different life,” said Shapiro. “She could have gone to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where [Chapman] had a house, and become part of the yacht set and she still would have had an interesting life. But I don’t think that was the life Amelia Earhart wanted, even if that meant she had a shorter life.”
Shapiro doesn’t neglect Putnam’s story, describing him as the “PT Barnum of publishing.” The family publishing company, G.P. Putnam and Sons, was founded in 1838 by his grandfather, and by the late 1920s, the ambitious young George was among several possible successors jockeying for position to replace his uncle, George Haven Putnam. He had his own ambitions, determined to bring what he viewed as a stodgy company fully into the 20th century.
Putnam published Charles Lindbergh‘s blockbuster memoir, We, in 1927 and followed that early success with a series of rather lurid adventure memoirs chronicling the exploits of “boy explorers.” The boys didn’t always survive their adventures, with one perishing from a snake bite and another drowning in a Bolivian flood. But the books were commercial successes, so Putnam kept cranking them out.
After Lindbergh’s historic crossing, Putnam was eager to tap into the public’s thirst for aviation stories. It wouldn’t be especially newsworthy to have another man make the same flight. But a woman? Putnam liked that idea, and a wealthy benefactor, steel heiress Amy Phipps Guest, provided financial support for the feat—really more of a publicity stunt, since Putnam’s plan, as always, was to publish a scintillating memoir of the journey. During the Jazz Age, newspapers routinely paid for exclusive rights to these kinds of stories in exchange for glowing coverage, per Shapiro. In this case, The New York Times did not initially want to sponsor a woman for a trans-Atlantic flight, but Putnam’s connections won them over.
