Svengali?

CLXXXIV

Amelia and “Mr. Earhart”

In any other family he might have just spent his life on the polo fields, chasing skirts, and drinking.

But George Palmer Putnam (1887-1950) had a different fate in store for himself. He was actually the second man to bear his name. His namesake paternal grandfather had founded the famous publishing firm of G.P. Putnam’s Sons* in 1840 along with John Wiley. Among the early authors associated with G.P. Putnam’s Sons were James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe. 

By the time the second George Palmer Putnam was born, the publishing house was booming, with many imprints and magazines under its rubric. It also had a surfeit of Putnams on its employee rolls, including George’s father and elder brother. Growing up, although George knew he had the family’s considerable wealth as a cushion, he also knew that as a second son, he would have to make his own way in the world if he wanted to be somebody.

 

He lazed his way through Prep School and Harvard, being more well-known for his sense of humor and practical jokes than his scholastic achievements. Nevertheless, after graduating college he became serious about his life. Following the adventurous example of Theodore Roosevelt, an older friend and one of the authors published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, George left New York and went West. He moved to the town of Bend, Oregon. He loved the piney woods around Bend and the open countryside. Like T.R., Putnam considered himself no longer an Eastern Establishment figure but a Western Gentleman Frontiersman.

Bend (named for its place on the river), now the largest city in Oregon’s interior, was then a busy but tiny village when George arrived just after the turn of the 20^th Century. George saw great potential in Bend. The city lay on the Deschutes River, giving farmers, loggers, and merchants upstream ready access to the city. And so, soon after George arrived he bought the local paper, The Bend Bulletin, turning it from a gossip sheet into a promotional tool for the town. It soon became an important regional paper, and George Putnam put Bend on the map for the first time. 

The countryside around Bend, Oregon

A tireless promoter, he tried to encourage the building of a railway to Bend, and in so doing set off a sometimes violent railroad war between E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad and  James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway. Whichever line reached the town first had rights to Bend, and in order to gain an advantage there (as in many other places) railway workers from the competing lines not only laid their own track they also sabotaged the work of the other line. Gang fighting and gunplay were involved, and men were killed. 

George Putnam demanded a meeting with Harriman and Hill, and though he had nothing much to leverage somehow managed to convince the two tycoons that both lines should service Bend. Upon returning triumphantly to town, the citizens elected him Mayor in 1912. “The Boy Mayor” was all of twenty-three. 

In 1914, he left Bend (temporarily or so he thought) to take up the job of Assistant to the Governor of Oregon in Salem. Since Oregon had no Lieutenant Governor, George acted in that de facto role, mostly promoting Oregon to Easterners looking to relocate. As head of the State Militia he organized its Federalization at the beginning of World War I. He himself did not go overseas; rather, he was assigned to the Mexican border, where the notorious bandit Pancho Villa had begun raiding (yet again) at the outset of the world war. George saw no action, but he wrote a series of heavily fictionalized adventuresome reports from the Mexican “front” under a series of pseudonyms. 

During this period, George married Dorothy Binney, the daughter of a chemicals magnate most famous for inventing (with his partner Smith) Crayola Crayons. They had two sons.

He probably would have become Governor of Oregon, but tragically, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 took both his father and his older brother, and before George even mustered out of the Army his Putnam relatives arranged for him to head G.P. Putnam’s Sons in New York. He was never to return to his beloved Bend, except for brief vacations thereafter. 

At the time he took up his role as publisher, George decided to expand G.P. Putnam’s Sons book list. Correctly reading the national mood as one of escapism, he had the children’s imprint publish a series of “Books For Young Readers,” many of them adventure stories, and he sought out explorers’ and aviators’ titles for adults. Among the most successful of these was Charles Lindbergh’s WE in 1927. He also invented the idea of publishing books on "spec" in response to newsworthy events. George, too, often had ideas for novels but no time to write them, and hired others to write the kinds of stories he liked. He did write several books himself as well.

George Putnam (r) and Captain Bob Bartlett, Expedition Master, on Baffin Island, 1927

The massive success of WE (650,000 copies in first run) convinced George that aviation was a hot field for books and he published many others including a novelized memoir by a World War I ace titled Wings.  The colorful action sequences of the book, George thought, might make a good movie, and so he approached Hollywood with the work. Filmed on a then-astronomical budget of $300,000.00, and with George as an Associate Producer, Wings was not only a hit. It won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture in 1927.   

Around the time G.P. Putnam’s Sons published WE, George also decided to emulate his friend President Roosevelt once again, and led two Arctic expeditions in 1927 and 1928. In part, this was a means of escaping personal problems. His marriage to Dorothy Binney collapsed when she took up with a man twenty years her junior. He did not, as it was reported later, leave his wife for Amelia Earhart. 

WE, the story of a man who flew across the Atlantic, spurred George to promote the idea of having a woman fly across the Atlantic. Amy Phipps Guest, the daughter of an American industrialist and wife of a British peer, and a billionaire in her own right, volunteered to be flown across the ocean, but soon thereafter backed out. A suffragette and a supporter of women’s causes, Guest recruited Amelia Earhart to take her place. 

Amelia had received the sixteenth female pilot’s license in the world, but by 1928 she hadn’t flown in several years due to her sinus difficulties. Nevertheless, armed with G.P. Putnam’s Sons’ marketing machinery and Amy Guest’s money, George was able to transform the mostly-grounded Social Worker into the world-famous pilot-heroine “Lady Lindy.”  At first it was all puff, including the transatlantic flight (as a passenger), but the explorer in George connected with the explorer in Amelia, and together they created a legitimate legend that has lasted eighty years. 

And they fell passionately if very unconventionally in love. They were “partners,” not man and wife, and George accepted the moniker of “Mr. Earhart” with little trouble and a lot of humor. Both adoring of the outdoors they shared many interests and both literate they devoured books. It has been said, wrongfully, that George pushed Amelia to undertake ever-more-dangerous flying adventures for the sake of fame and fortune, and it has been suggested that he essentially caused her death, but neither remark is respectful of the spirit that lived in Amelia Earhart, diminishing her to a puppet and a plaything, perhaps the only role the patriarchy of the time could allow her. 

The truth is George enthusiastically supported Amelia’s plans and often funded them with his own fortune. He published her books, and was definitely her impresario. But there is no evidence anywhere that Amelia ever undertook a challenge that was not her own.     

 

George and Amelia standing near the Lockheed Electra Model 10 that would claim her life

*The name of the publishing house founded by the first G.P. Putnam went through and continues to go through generational iterations, as do its many imprints and affiliated publications. For ease I’ve chosen to refer to the company as “G.P. Putnam’s Sons” throughout.