And so it happened that one day, inquiring about the people in Earhart's life, she asked her grandmother—who had married four times before dying in 1982 at age 93—a difficult question: "What man did you love the most?"
"She looked at me with a look I'd never seen before, and she said, 'There was one very special man in my life once.' And that was it," says Chapman. A few days later, however, the gentle woman she called Dofry handed her 10 diaries, filled with a lifetime of thoughts. "You need to have these," she said, "so you will understand."
Twenty-five years later, in her new book Whistled Like a Bird, Chapman unveils a tale much more complex than she had imagined—and one at odds with most previous tellings. In 1929 a nation insatiable for news of the glamorous aviator and her links to her married publisher pored over accounts of the Putnam split. Chapman's grandmother was portrayed as a wife pushed aside to make way for Earhart, and her grandfather as a Svengali who courted his lover with the same pragmatic instincts he used to promote her historic flights. But the diaries entrusted to Chapman offer another point of view, one that dispels myths, uncovers passions and, most important for Chapman, at least, redefines the heroine in her famous family saga.
"As I began to sort everything out, I no longer felt the story was about Amelia," says Chapman, who is married to Jack Chapman, 63, a retired broadcasting executive (they have three grown sons). "Amelia was an amazing person. But I knew my story was about my grandmother."
The story of Dorothy Binney and George Palmer Putnam began in 1908 on the slopes of California's Mount Whitney. She, the 19-year-old heiress to the Crayola crayon fortune, was a first-time climber with the Sierra Club; he, the 20-year-old heir to the G.P. Putnam's Sons publishing dynasty, was a guide. Three years later, they wed and set up home in Bend, Ore., where Putnam owned, edited and wrote for the local Bend Bulletin. They traveled the world, and Putnam wrote about their experiences, while she helped type and edit his copy.
Eventually, Putnam hired other helpers—to his wife's dismay. "Dofry no longer had her little career," says Chapman. The birth of Dorothy's two children—David, Sally Chapman's father, in 1913, and George Jr. in 1921—created new demands. While she adored her children, says Chapman, motherhood was simply not enough: "It bothered her that she didn't feel her role was significant anymore."
In 1919, G.P. moved his family to his birthplace in Rye, N.Y. There, Dorothy took her place as the lady of Rocknoll, their six-bedroom estate, and her husband took his place in the family business. He secured the rights to the writings of Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight in 1927, and in 1928 he hatched a plan to have an unknown pilot named Amelia Earhart become the first woman to take part in and write about a similar journey.
Grounded by bad weather for several days before her scheduled departure from Boston, Earhart, then 30, took great pleasure in the company of her publisher's lively, savvy wife. "She looked up to my grandmother," says Chapman. When Earhart returned from her journey, she was a hero and, in the spotlight, grew even closer to Dorothy. "Amelia needed to learn how to dress and speak," says Chapman. "Dofry helped her." But for Earhart, who spent two months at Rocknoll writing 20 Hrs., 40 Min., there was more than friendship in the works. After finishing her book, she began a cross-country promotional tour along with her publisher. Dorothy's diaries make clear that she knew her husband was involved with Earhart by the end of 1928, but they also show she was far from distraught. "She didn't blame him," says Chapman, "because she was involved in her own love affair."
A year earlier, at 38, Dorothy had fallen for the "one very special man" in her life: George Weymouth, a 22-year-old Yale sophomore who had been hired to tutor her son David. The affair rescued her emotionally from what had become a loveless marriage ("the whole world has a new significance!" she wrote in May 1927). Troubled by her infidelity and wary of asking for a divorce lest she lose custody of her children, she ended the affair after a year. Still, she saw the liaison between her husband and Earhart less as a betrayal than an excuse to start her own life anew.
The Putnams divorced in 1929. In 1931, Earhart married G.P., moved into Rocknoll and assumed her old friend's life. "You read about [Earhart] working in the garden and, well, my grandmother planted those flowers," says Chapman. But aside from the initial trauma—"How scared and empty I feel," wrote Dorothy after the split—neither she nor other family members, says Chapman, felt anger: "No one took sides."
According to Chapman, who has read her grandfather's love letters to Earhart, longtime speculation that the marriage was mostly a business union are simply untrue. Indeed, Earhart brought out a tenderness in Putnam—often "a cold man" says Chapman—few others had seen: "They were desperately in love." For her grandmother, happiness was more elusive. Less than a month after divorcing Putnam, she married World War I hero Frank Upton, only to find, she wrote, that he was an abusive alcoholic. She divorced him in 1936—a year before Earhart went down over the Pacific, leaving Putnam a widower.
Both G.P. and Dorothy married, and divorced, again, but never would anyone alter their lives as Earhart had. And while Dorothy's diaries do not unlock the mystery of Earhart's disappearance, says Chapman, they do shed unexpected light on the daring pilot Chapman considers a hero. "Wouldn't Amelia have been a wonderful old lady?" says Chapman. "She would have been a lot like Dofry."
KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
DON SIDER in Fort Pierce
- Contributors:
- Don Sider.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
