Here’s Which Marx Brother Might Have Had Sex With Amelia Earhart

In the annals of American history, there are few figures as heroic and determined as Amelia Earhart. In the 1920s and 1930s, she defied highly restrictive gender norms to set a multitude of aviation records, including becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, the first woman to fly solo nonstop from coast-to-coast and the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean. 

There is, however, one conquest that you likely won’t find in any of the countless aviation museums that honor her memory: She very possibly had sex with one of the Marx Brothers.

For those who may need a refresher, “The Four Marx Brothers” to “The Three Marx Brothers.” There was even a fifth Marx Brother named Gummo, who wasn’t in the act but sometimes served as their agent. 

So which of these lucky fellas may have done the barrel roll with Amelia Earhart? 

The ever-silent Harpo — at least that’s what highly-respected Marx brothers historian Robert S. Bader has speculated. 

Bader is one of, if not the single most accomplished authority on the Marx Brothers. He wrote Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother and Speaking of Harpo with Harpo’s widow, edited Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales and produced the films Groucho & Cavett and You Bet Your Life: The Lost Episodes. His most extensive work on the Marx Brothers is the 500-page tome Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, and it was during his decades-long research for the book that he formed his theory about Harpo and Earhart.

“The Marx Brothers moved to Hollywood in 1931,” Bader explains. “Harpo and Amelia Earhart most likely met on the set of the 1932 film Horse Feathers, though it could have been a bit earlier, on the set of 1931’s Monkey Business. There are photographs of her on the set of Horse Feathers. She autographed one to him, and he autographed one to her. He signed his ‘Harpistictally yours.’ They were also seen together at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1932. When they were photographed at the Olympics, I don’t think there was any doubt that they were there as a couple.”

Beyond those photographs, there are no letters between them, nor any further tangible evidence of a relationship. While Bader does emphasize the “look in their eyes” in those photographs, what really gives the theory credence is the circumstances of Earhart’s marriage paired with some awkwardly-arranged and outright false details from Harpo’s autobiography.

Earhart was married in early 1931 to her promoter, George Putnam, but their marriage was open. They even had a prenuptial agreement in which Earhart declared that neither she nor her soon-to-be husband would be constrained to “any midaevil code of faithfulness.” Earhart, who is believed to have been bisexual, was rumored to have other relationships with famous people, including aviator Eugene Vidal and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In his 1961 memoir Harpo Speaks, Harpo writes of a woman he met when he first moved to Hollywood named June Fleming. Harpo describes June as an “active, independent gal” who “flew her own airplane.” He says they went steady for four months, but on the day before he was going to propose to her, she “crashed into a mountain flying back from Palm Springs and was killed.” 

Here’s the thing, according to all of Bader’s research, “June Fleming” didn’t exist, nor did her supposed plane crash. “I did all the research you could possibly do on this,” Bader says. “There was no small aircraft that crashed in that area anytime in the 1930s. That’s a made-up story.” 

Bader believes Harpo was combining the stories of two separate women he dated into one for the memoir. “For his book, Harpo created a composite character of Kathleen Fleming, the woman he dated in Vaudeville decades earlier, and Amelia Earhart,” he says. “He called her June Fleming, but when you put all the pieces together, the aviatrix in Los Angeles hanging out at Paramount is Amelia Earhart.”

The reason for the deception, Bader explains, is fairly straightforward. Harpo met Susan Fleming (no relation to Kathleen Fleming), who he would later marry, in 1932 at a dinner party. They began dating soon after and married in 1936. During those early years, Harpo continued to date other women. By the time he was writing his memoir, Harpo and Susan had been happily married for decades and likely didn’t want to it to dating other women at the same time he was dating her. “He basically kills off the aviatrix character before he meets Susan,” says Bader.

Bader has tried to confirm his theory about Harpo and Earhart, but he hasn’t had much luck. “The people at Purdue University who keep Earhart’s archives are extremely protective of her. They want to sell her as wholesome,” he says. And while he did help Susan write her autobiography, he said he felt it would be “in bad form” to bring up this topic to a widow now in her 80s. He did, however, discuss it with Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, who said he felt it could be true.

Unable to prove anything, Bader never meant to make a big deal of his theory and only included it as a footnote in his book. “It’s in a footnote, probably buried three-quarters of the way down that enormous book. It’s not meant to be a headline story out of the book,” Bader explains. 

So how did this become a more public story? 

Enter another comedy legend, the late Gilbert Gottfried. In 2017, Bader was a guest on Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, and less than one minute into the interview with Bader, Gottfried’s co-host Frank Santopadre asked Bader, “Gilbert wants to know, did Harpo have a fling with Amelia Earhart?” From there, Gottfried went on and on about the alleged affair, even asking Bader, “Was it true that when she was on the plane last, she started masturbating, thinking about Harpo, and that’s why she crashed?”

Bader goes on to say, “It wasn’t a big story to me, but Gilbert made it a big story. He brought it up every time I saw him, all three times I was on the podcast and when I saw him at premieres and events. It was just a footnote, but since that podcast, I get so many questions from people who listened to that podcast without necessarily reading the book and they think it’s a book about Harpo fucking Amelia Earhart, but it’s not.”

Ultimately, Bader says it’s very difficult to prove someone had sex in the 1930s. “I have nothing more than my informed speculation based on my research,” he says. The only thing we can really be sure of is, if there is an afterlife, one of the first things Gottfried did after he died was track down Harpo Marx and ask him how Amelia Earhart was in bed.