Earhart's Mystique Takes Wing Again
FAME is fleeting, of course, but certain forms of it are stickier than others. More than seven decades after her death the aviatrix Amelia Earhart still fascinates. Called Lady Lindy for her willingness to attempt ill-advised, even foolhardy feats, she has been the subject of more than 100 books, and her name is plastered on bridges, Navy ships, museums and festivals throughout the United States and points beyond. Now she is the subject of a biopic, “Amelia,” directed by Mira Nair, starring Hilary Swank and opening Friday, which reverently portrays a celebrity who remained remarkably irreverent and curiously humble until her death while trying to circumnavigate the globe.
Her disappearance in 1937 and its attendant mystery account for some of the ongoing allure, but she endures because she was a pioneer whose adventures went beyond personal aggrandizement. Earhart took on the laws of nature (humans were not meant to fly) and the conventions of the time (adventure was a man’s business) and seemed to soar above both. “I want to do it because I want to do it,” she said, as a way to explain her desire to accomplish what no woman had.
Her pluck is a matter of record, but parts of her life remain tantalizingly out of reach. And that knowledge gap convinced a number of Amelia-philes — including Ted Waitt, the co-founder of the computer maker Gateway — that there were enough complications behind the legend to make for a motion picture. Earhart was her own thing, but she was also ripe for the projection of others — a goad not only to dream big, but to live large.
Ms. Nair, director of Indian-theme movies like “Salaam Bombay!,” “The Namesake,” and “Monsoon Wedding” (a story soon to be on Broadway), calls Earhart as America’s first modern celebrity. A hero of the protofeminist movement for her single-mindedness, Earhart was also commercially shrewd and aware that her fame had uses beyond her own gratification.
As her flying exploits mounted, bringing hope and adventure to the dreary decade of the 1930s, Earhart wrote books, magazine stories (she was a contributing editor at Cosmopolitan), starred in newsreels, endorsed numerous products and, yes, designed her own line of “active living” clothing. But what put her in the cockpit of all those endeavors in the first place was an ability and willingness to fly airplanes, often over long distances, at a time when flying was considered a sport, and a risky one at that.
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Her disappearance in 1937 and its attendant mystery account for some of the ongoing allure, but she endures because she was a pioneer whose adventures went beyond personal aggrandizement. Earhart took on the laws of nature (humans were not meant to fly) and the conventions of the time (adventure was a man’s business) and seemed to soar above both. “I want to do it because I want to do it,” she said, as a way to explain her desire to accomplish what no woman had.
Her pluck is a matter of record, but parts of her life remain tantalizingly out of reach. And that knowledge gap convinced a number of Amelia-philes — including Ted Waitt, the co-founder of the computer maker Gateway — that there were enough complications behind the legend to make for a motion picture. Earhart was her own thing, but she was also ripe for the projection of others — a goad not only to dream big, but to live large.
Ms. Nair, director of Indian-theme movies like “Salaam Bombay!,” “The Namesake,” and “Monsoon Wedding” (a story soon to be on Broadway), calls Earhart as America’s first modern celebrity. A hero of the protofeminist movement for her single-mindedness, Earhart was also commercially shrewd and aware that her fame had uses beyond her own gratification.
As her flying exploits mounted, bringing hope and adventure to the dreary decade of the 1930s, Earhart wrote books, magazine stories (she was a contributing editor at Cosmopolitan), starred in newsreels, endorsed numerous products and, yes, designed her own line of “active living” clothing. But what put her in the cockpit of all those endeavors in the first place was an ability and willingness to fly airplanes, often over long distances, at a time when flying was considered a sport, and a risky one at that.