Aviator Amelia Earhart was carried by Lurline from Los Angeles to Honolulu with her Lockheed Vega airplane secured on deck during December 22–27, 1934.

[3] Lurline was halfway from Honolulu to San Francisco on 7 December 1941, carrying a record load of 765 passengers,[4] when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

[5] The ship's alleged reception of radio signals from the Japanese fleet became part of the Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory.

[6][7] She arrived safely on December 10, travelling in a zigzag path under radio silence and blacked out at night,[5][8][9] and soon returned to Hawaii with her Matson sisters Mariposa and Monterey in a convoy laden with troops and supplies.

[citation needed] On 30 April 30 1942, the SS Lurline, along with a convoy of seven Matson Line ships including USS Hugh L. Scott, boarded the 32nd Infantry Division at Pier 42 in San Francisco.

[13] She spent the war providing similar services, often voyaging to Australia, and once transported Australian Prime Minister John Curtin to America to confer with President Roosevelt.

"[14] Lurline was returned to Matson Lines in mid-1946 and extensively refitted at Bethlehem-Alameda Shipyard in Alameda, California,[15] in 1947 at a cost exceeding US$18 million, with accommodations designed by Raymond Loewy for 484 first-class and 238 cabin-class passengers, served by a crew of 444.

[19][20] Her high occupancy rates during the early 1950s caused Matson to also refit her sister ship Monterey (renaming her SS Matsonia) and the two liners provided a first-class-only service between Hawaii and the American mainland from June 1957 to September 1962, mixed with the occasional Pacific cruise.

Only a few months later, Lurline arrived in Los Angeles with serious engine trouble in her port turbine, and was laid up, with the required repairs considered too expensive.

Some of her fittings were installed in other Chandris ships; her engine parts were stored against future need by her aging sister Britanis (ex-Monterey).

William Matson had first come to appreciate the name in the 1870s while serving as skipper aboard the Claus Spreckels family yacht Lurline (a poetic variation of Lorelei, the Rhine River siren)[22] out of San Francisco Bay.

That same year had SS Malolo (Hawaiian for "flying fish") enter service inaugurating a higher class of tourist travel to Hawaii.

Joan Didion mentions Lurline in several of the essays included in her books Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), in which she discusses Hawaii's place in the popular imagination of Californians like herself and her family.