BOOKS IN REVIEW

THE SOUND OF WINGS: The Life of Amelia Earhart, by Mary S. Lovell, St. Martin’s Press, 420 pages, $22.95.

Somewhere in airplane heaven, Amelia Earhart must finally be flashing the “aw shucks” grin that electrified the world half a century ago, when she broke the sex barrier to became the most celebrated female aviator of her time.

Following a confusing spate of books on her 1937 disappearance in the South Pacific, while she was attempting to fly around the world, comes a solid new biography of Amelia, the woman, that relates how this Kansas tomboy, the daughter of an alcoholic father, beat the odds to become “Lady Lindbergh.”

“Amelia was a very bright woman,” said Mary S. Lovell, who spent two years writing the book. “Had she not been lost she would have excelled during the war, and then perhaps operated her own aircraft company.”

Lovell, who wrote the international best seller, “Straight on Till Morning,” a biography of 1930s aviatrix Beryl Markham, said she heard stories about Amelia in 1960, while living in Los Angeles where she worked for an antique aircraft association.

“I was in charge of lining up speakers,” she said by telephone from her home in England. “One was Paul Mantz, a Hollywood stunt pilot who had been Amelia’s technical adviser. He had terrific sex appeal and I would listen wide-eyed to his stories about her ineptitude as a pilot.”

Thirty years later, after reading Earhart’s personal papers and interviewing her sister, Muriel, Lovell was dismayed to learn Mantz’ yarns about Earhart’s domination by her husband, publisher George P. Putnam, were so much rubbish.

“For some reason, Amelia took off from Los Angeles on the first leg of her round-the-world flight without even telling Paul,” said Lovell, a snub Mantz never forgot but that ironically saved his life. “And there was something in her will that was detrimental to him. After she was lost, there was a miserable fight between Paul and George that ended their relationship.”

The Earhart-Putnam romance is at the core of “The Sound of Wings,” which argues that the two really were in love and that Putnam did not use Earhart for his own ends. Drawing on George’s papers, which the Putnam family turned over carte blanche, Lovell offers insights into this apparent mismatch between a career woman and a mercurial extrovert 10 years her senior.

Putnam was already married to another woman when he began seeing Amelia in 1928 after suggesting she fly the Atlantic, the first woman to do so. A year earlier he had turned Charles Lindbergh’s first-person story into a best seller and saw the promotional possibilites in Amelia, who was at once masculine and irresistibly feminine.

Putnam’s publicity machine went into action after Amelia crossed the Atlantic as a passenger in 1928, flew it solo in 1932, and flew the Pacific in 1935, to mention but a few milestones.

Lovell examines the many disappearance theories and, drawing on her own experience as a pilot, reaches a simple conclusion about the fate of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

“All the documented facts point to a ditching off Howland Island, which neither flier survived,” she writes.

Case closed? Don’t be so sure.

Richard R. Shaw is the NEWS editorial page assistant.