Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 21, 1994 TAG: 9402190089
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULES LOH ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
Long before anybody ever heard of a School Book Depository or a grassy knoll there was the cry: The king is dead, long live the king.
No easy solution will suffice for the wretched murder of the hero's son; no simple solution to the mystery of the heroine's death. Long live Charles and Amelia.
But today there seems to be a more than cyclical interest. Book writers, historians, TV documentarians, filmmakers, advertising copywriters and others apparently have decided that both are hot topics.
Especially Earhart. Most of the new interest, however, focuses on a new discovery - that America's favorite missing person is more than just the subject of the 20th century's favorite mystery but also a most interesting person in her own right. The new outpouring about Earhart is mainly a rediscovery of the personality that vanished with her, the essential Amelia.
At least that is the explanation most give for the sudden explosion of Ameliana.
"Everywhere I look," says Susan Ware, "Amelia keeps popping up, and not just in books and on the tube. Here's a Gap ad, for heaven's sake, and there's Amelia looking terrificin khaki pants."
Ware, a 43-year-old social historian who teaches at New York University, is one of the rediscoverers. Her new book, "Still Missing," makes the point that Earhart, a product of the '30s, remains very much a woman of the '90s in her looks, dress and commitment to feminism.
And why, at the same time, a corollary interest in Lindbergh? The reason is less apparent.
Marshall Fishwick, a Virginia Tech professor of humanities who specializes in popular culture, speculates that the interest in both "reflects our yearning for heroes in the age of anti-heroes."
Whatever the reason, since 1987, the 50th anniversary of her final flight, the Library of Congress lists more than two dozen titles about Amelia Earhart. Ware's biography came out last October. A one-hour documentary on Earhart appeared last November on PBS's American Experience series. In the past six months two new books (two more!) purport to solve the mystery of her disappearance. And next July, Turner Network Television will serve up a two-hour movie with Dianne Keaton playing Amelia.
As for Lindbergh, the Library of Congress lists 10 new titles in the past nine years, and one publisher, Harvest Books, offers in its spring catalog reissues of two books about the couple by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and a third by Charles with a new introduction by his son. These and most of the others deal with Lindbergh the aviator, the conservationist, the thinker.
But four of those new books return to the never-ending question. Indeed, one author, Gregory Alhgren, simply made it the title of his 1992 book: "The Crime of the Century: the Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax." Another recent book listing is a novel based on the crime. The latest nonfiction entry, published last year, is a 464-page analysis by Noel Behn who likewise concludes that the wrong man was executed. And there has been at least one play.
Both the PBS Earhart documentary (which its producers say will surely be shown again) and the TNT film relied heavily on a 1989 biography by Doris Rich published by the Smithsonian Institution.
"Doris' book and another by Mary Lovell that came out at the same time were really the only good biographies of Amelia up until then," said Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.
"I'm glad to see this new one by Susan Ware. It's excellent. Amelia is an awfully interesting human being. I get a lot of questions about her disappearance and I often tell people they ought to pay as much attention to her life as to her death."
But, says Crouch, the fact remains that it was the great unsolved mystery of her death that set off the current interest in her life. In fact, he believes the seeds of the current Earhart revival were sown when Richard Gillespie, who heads an organization devoted to aviation history, returned from the South Pacific four years ago with artifacts he claimed were from Earhart's plane.
"They weren't," said Crouch, "But Rick and I have been arguing about it ever since."
With interest in Earhart revived, their argument has taken on aspects of a road show for aviation groups. Last fall they appeared at the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis and went at it again. "Connie Chung had me on just last week," said Crouch.
Now two new books are out adding fuel to the Earhart mystery.
To review, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, off on a well-promoted round-the-world 1937 aviation spectacular, disappeared July 3 on the last leg, a 2,500-mile flight from New Guinea to a dot in the Pacific, Howland Island.
The first of the two new books is by Henri Keyzer-Andre, an 86-year-old pioneer pilot who knew Amelia personally. He claims to have found out 20 years later, while working in Japan, what happened: The Japanese executed her to steal her plane's technology. He kept that knowledge to himself until now.
Close, says Randall Brink. Brink's book, "Lost Star: The Search for Amelia Earhart," contends that Earhart was on a top secret reconnaissance mission to photograph Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands - "the Francis Gary Powers of 1937" - and was alive in China well after the end of World War II. Brink, too, is an established aviation expert who made a breakthrough in 10 years of research with new material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Tom Crouch believes that Earhart, lost and out of fuel, rests somewhere on the ocean floor.
"That's been the problem," says Ware. "Anytime you heard the name Amelia Earhart you thought only of her disappearance. The cult of the mystery caused everyone to lose sight of Amelia the person.
"I titled my book `Still Missing.' It offers nothing new about her last flight, but about the search for modern feminism. Her message during her very brief public career was to challenge women not to be held back by artificial barriers and all the rest. This woman who still looks so modern also talks so modern."
In the case of Lindbergh, mystery and suspicion over the guilt of Richard Hauptmann, the man executed for kidnapping his child, have also tended to shove aside anything new about the aviator's thoughts and accomplishments, though there is little left to say.
Biographers have a much easier time with Earhart; her husband, G.P. Putnam, an accomplished promoter, saw to that.
Further, "She came of age at the same time newsreels came of age," said Nancy Porter, who wrote, produced and directed the PBS film. "Back then they shot 10-to-1," she said, "shot 10 times more film than they used. So we saw film that had never been seen before, and it showed her in a less canned way."
Maybe the Virginia professor was correct, too, about a current thirst for heroes.
"In the postwar world from the '50s to the '80s there were really no heroes or heroines," said Susan Ware, "no larger-than-life characters like Lindbergh and Amelia. Heroes today tend to be from the sports world, and male. Feminism has produced some female leaders, but not heroines. Maybe we have to go back a ways to find them.
"Amelia Earhart is a good heroine to rediscover."
by CNB