Whistled Like a Bird: The Untold Story of Dorothy Putnam, George Putnam and Amelia Earhart
By Sally Putnam Chapman, with Stephanie Mansfield
Warner Books, 268 pages, $22
Dorothy Binney Putnam could see that her husband was falling in love with another woman, a woman who was fast becoming her best friend. In a conventional tale, she’d have been cast as the reject.
But Dorothy wasn’t a conventional woman. Heiress to the Crayola crayon fortune and a free spirit, she watched her marriage unravel with a mixture of jealousy and relief, for she herself was in love–with her son’s tutor.
Her husband was George Putnam, a prominent New York publisher and explorer. Her rival and friend was perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time–Amelia Earhart.
Obviously, this is the stuff of a good story, and it’s well-told in “Whistled Like a Bird: The Untold Story of Dorothy Putnam, George Putnam and Amelia Earhart.” Author Sally Putnam Chapman is Dorothy’s granddaughter and the stepgranddaughter of Earhart, who eventually did marry her grandfather.
When Dorothy was 82, she gave Chapman her private diaries, spanning the years 1907-61. The diaries form the basis of this intimate chronicle. The book provides an insider’s look at affluent lives in early 20th Century America and a fresh view of an irresistible icon, Amelia Earhart.
Chapman’s story begins in 1928, with Dorothy and Amelia taking off in a small Avro Avian airplane. The two adventurers were both “addicted to risk,” Chapman writes. They “had much in common,” but were also “light-years apart.”
After Earhart’s historic transatlantic flight, she was invited to stay at the Putnam home to write a book about her adventure. When Earhart confided to Dorothy that she wanted to dedicate the book to her, Dorothy was surprised and suspicious. “Was it a sop to me because she’d monopolized George all summer?” she wrote.
Chapman follows Dorothy from her youth, when she exhibited an early love of the outdoors (“Up at dawn to go wild turkey hunting. Home at nine, then chopped trees, then quail hunting. . . .”). She shows her grandmother trout fishing with a rather stiff George Putnam in 1908. Later, engaged to him, she hoped that “he would loosen up a bit.” The marriage was exciting and fulfilling in the early years. Later, Dorothy felt marginalized by her husband’s involvement in his work.
Eventually seeing that her husband and Earhart had “become a couple,” Dorothy longed for separation or divorce. Insecurity haunted her and the “charm” of suicide crept into her thoughts.
Moments of passion and joy play against the relentless march of time in “Whistled Like a Bird.” The book ends on a poignant note: Chapman’s chance meeting with the former tutor, the love of Dorothy’s life, now a white-haired octogenarian. “He looked down at me for what seemed like an eternity, and then slowly turned to his wife. . . . `Dear,’ he said with quiet dignity, `do you remember only yesterday I told you of a woman who whistled like a bird?’ “
