Before the wedding of GP and AE in February, 1931, there were warnings given to both. Why did they want to marry? Why did GP want to become a hero’s husband? Of all men why did Amelia Earhart choose George Palmer Putnam?
No one, perhaps, understood heroes better than George Putnam. Himself a writer, publisher, explorer, and promoter with, as Time said of him, “the dangerous combination of literary ability, business acumen, [and] energy,” he was to the young Amelia Earhart the fitting opposite to her essentially modest and retiring nature. He was, in brief, her kind of man.
Soon after the Friendship flight AE realized that she needed a man to protect her, to help her continue as the symbol that she was. GP was the man to clear the way for her, to find the money, to stand beside her in the press of circumstance, to support her in every venture. Although many men could fill such requirements in a husband, Amelia felt that she could find happiness, if it were possible to find it with anybody, only with George Putnam.
For GP his first wife, Dorothy Binney, had given him many good years and two sons. But the Oregon years were in the distant past and by 1928 they had become cool and aloof toward each other. Dorothy Binney divorced him on a formal charge of “failure to provide,” and moved to Florida. George continued at Rye. He was never long without a wife.
The marriage of AE and GP was, to employ a metaphor from flight, a delicate combination of solo and dual. George was forty-two years old; Amelia, thirty-two.
Before the ceremony at the home of George’s mother in Noank, Connecticut, on February 8, 1931, AE gave GP a letter that defined an attitude for the future course of their life together:
Dear GP, there are some things which should be writ. Things we have talked over before—most of them.
You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do. I know there may be compensations, but have no heart to look ahead.
In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which arise may best be avoided....
Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be by myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.