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In Gore Vidal’s 2006 memoir, Point to Point Navigation, he name drops his way through more than four decades of a very interesting life with great stories about the famous and notorious folks who crossed his path. One tale is related by his stepmother, Kit, about her former husband and Gore Vidal’s father, Gene Vidal, and his relationship with the pioneering woman pilot, Amelia Earhart, with whom he apparently had a long-running affair. Gene Vidal was also a pilot as well as an innovative businessman involved in many aspects of what was then called air commerce.
According to Kit, her husband had a theory about the accident over the Pacific that killed Earhart. He believed that she had deliberately crashed the plane: “’She was going through a bad time with G.P. [George Palmer Putnam, her publisher husband]; she was also undergoing some sort of premature menopause.’”
Whew! It seems that no matter where you turn, if a woman is having a bad day, the menstrual explanation will be trotted out. But suicide by plane crash as a response to perimenopause?!?! Now, there’s a flight of fancy.
