Lindbergh
Page 43
Diminutive Elizabeth Morrow was the ideal consort for a rumpled, obsessive, absentminded poet-philosopher-business genius trapped between materialism and idealism. Born in Cleveland, Elizabeth Reeve Cutter graduated from Smith College in 1896, then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Florence, Italy. She had a passion for education and taught school prior to her marriage to Dwight on June 16, 1903. Betty, as Morrow called her, was thirty at the time of their marriage, as was he. Their courtship, which was sparked at an Amherst dance when both were students, had lasted ten years. By 1927, they were rich, had maids, valets, cooks, and one chauffeur and limousine to drive Dwight from Englewood to the Hudson River ferry and another to pick him up on the Manhattan side and deliver him to the Morgan office. Betty ran the household with a benevolent but no-nonsense efficiency. She pandered to the social obligations requisite for their station but, like her husband, did not feel all that comfortable at functions given by the wealthy and powerful, who were their peers and friends.
It was with their children that the family idyll and privacy was attained by Dwight and Betty. They were a gay and loving clan bonded by “common factors of intelligence, curiosity, wit, independence, energy, and youthfulness.”8 Holidays were jubilant sacrosanct events. During the working week breakfast was usually the only meal at which the children saw their father, and it was often a raucous encounter. Dwight, who could not keep a tune, always whistled the same ditty on his descent from upstairs into the kitchen, where there was a scramble for his attention. The girls, sometimes all three at once, would rush to kiss him. There was a good deal of competition and many complaints, particularly over kissing. The girls much preferred the gentle Cutter kisses of their mother compared with their father’s loud Morrow smacks. Even so, it was a festive and loving time.
Literature was a common denominator among the Morrows, some of whom read more voraciously than others. Reading aloud was also a popular family entertainment—listening to accounts of the leper colony in Ben-Hur was so real to the children that they feared catching the disease.9 Writing letters to one another became an activity that Anne made into an art form. Betty excelled at composing poems and passed the passion for this on to the youngsters. Travel was requisite, and Dwight reveled in taking the family on tours of America and Europe, particularly to the historic sights of the ancient world.
Like their parents, the three Morrow girls were short. Elisabeth was the closest to Dwight in temperament and humor,10 then came Constance. The circle they moved in was wealthy but generally removed from that of the New York City socialites: Uncle Jack was J. P. Morgan, Jr., himself; Tom Lamont was another unofficial uncle. In public the sisters’ deportment was impeccable. Alone and tittering, the three daughters could create quite a racket. By December of 1927, Elisabeth was the great beauty of the family. Constance came second. But Anne was strikingly pretty, and her distinctive looks grew on those who knew her. Anne was more reserved but highly competitive with Elisabeth when it came to boys.
Dwight, in his usual deliberate fashion, agonized over whether to accept the Mexican ambassadorship. Associates at J. P. Morgan, who had always expected that the president would name his former college chum secretary of the treasury or at least make Morrow ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, viewed the assignment in Mexico as a shortcut to political suicide. It had been so in the past, and now relations between the two countries were at a new low. American Catholics and powerful oil interests wanted to cut off ties with the government of Plutarco Elías Calles, who had continued with the left-wing policies of his predecessor, Álvaro Obregón.
Feeling that it was an unrewarding appointment, Betty Morrow was among those who didn’t want her husband to take the ambassadorship. Given her druthers, she would have preferred to remain in the United States and oversee the construction of the new estate they were having built in Englewood as well as a summer mansion in Maine. After protracted consideration Dwight finally told the president that yes, he would accept the position. Before leaving America, he had Charles Lindbergh come to his Manhattan apartment, where, acting on a suggestion from Walter Lippmann, Morrow proposed that the Lone Eagle fly The Spirit of St. Louis to Mexico on a goodwill mission.11
Lindbergh, who wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of night and winter flights before remanding the craft to a museum, accepted Morrow’s invitation. No one had expected Lucky Lindy to attempt a nonstop flight, which is exactly what occurred on December 13, 1927, when he took off from Washington, D.C., at 12:26 P.M. and, thanks in part to stormy skies, got lost.12 Morrow, President Calles, Mrs. Morrow, and Constance had come to Valbuena Airport in Mexico City at 8:30 A.M., the scheduled time of landing. They and 150,000 other bystanders spent the balance of the morning and early afternoon sweltering in the sun. According to Mrs. Morrow’s calculations, Lindbergh set down at exactly eighteen minutes before 3:00 P.M.13 Like the rest of the crowd, she had been thrilled by his arrival.
A three-day train trip brought Elisabeth and Anne Morrow from Texas to Mexico City. It was now December 21, and Constance was jumping up and down on the station platform to get a glimpse of them. Daddy Dwight was there as well, and the reunion was huggy-kissy. En route to the embassy, the arriving sisters were told that Colonel Lindbergh was there—a very nice boy, very nice, but he and Daddy were going out tonight. Elisabeth and Anne were somewhat agitated by all this public-hero stuff breaking into the family party. Who was this boy? Anne projected him to be a stereotypical media hero, a baseball-player type—a nice man, perhaps, but not at all intellectual, not of their world at all. She certainly wasn’t going to worship Lindy, a name she considered to be odious.14
The gates to the embassy opened. Their car entered and stopped beside a wall of geraniums that rose at their right. To the left was a red velvet carpet descending a stone staircase, on which officers were standing at attention. At the head of the stairs was a great movie-scene door. How ridiculous, was all Anne could think of. An exhausted Elisabeth plunked herself down on the steps. The Morrow girls finally ascended and joined a reception line of celebrities waiting to meet the Lone Eagle, who was in evening dress and standing against a great stone pillar. Mrs. Morrow hurried up and made the introduction. “Colonel Lindbergh, this is my oldest daughter, Elisabeth.” Anne found him to be much slimmer and taller than she anticipated and more refined than in the newspaper’s grinning Lindy pictures, more poised. When it was her turn to be introduced, he looked down at her with clear, straight blue eyes. His firm mouth did not smile as he bowed and shook Anne’s hand.15
They were opposites in so many ways, the elfin Morrow family and the tall, gangling Charles Lindbergh. Dwight and Elizabeth were happily married and devoted to their loving, demonstrative offspring. Lindbergh’s parents had separated when he was five, and he had desperately sought affection from each. Displays of warmth were a hard commodity to come by from a doting, overprotective but distant mother who, throughout his life, shook hands with him goodnight. His father, a pacifist-isolationist U.S. congressman from Minnesota, distrusted the East Coast international establishment, of which the J. P. Morgan interests were a leading devil, and was hung in effigy for his opposition to America’s entry into World War I. A stoic, the elder Lindbergh had once endured an operation without taking an anesthetic. When young Charles, who did not know how to swim, fell into a river inlet, his father refused to go to his rescue, reasoning that this was a perfect opportunity for the boy to save his own life by learning how to swim.16
Charles Lindbergh grew up a diffident, often sullen, monosyllabic young man who was decidedly shy around women. He was invested with the regional bigotries of his day, which were myriad. His sense of humor seems to have evolved in the rough-and-tumble world of open-cockpit pilots, which rendered him something of a locker room flying jock with a propensity for coarse, barracks-type practical jokes. What he knew best was airplanes. What he did best was fly. Even so, there was a decided ability to write. He was patently self-assured, if not vain, and enjoyed being in the co
mpany of great people, even though he protested he did not. He had an immediate and lasting affection for Dwight Morrow and made no secret of this.
When his mother, Evangeline, arrived in Mexico City for the holidays, she immediately befriended Dwight’s sister Alice, who like herself was a teacher. Mrs. Lindbergh also seemed to get on well with the Morrow girls. Her son was more reserved with them.
Beautiful and bubbly Elisabeth was his table partner the first night that she and Anne attended a dinner with him in Mexico City. Lindy seemed to take to her and even more to Constance, who was on his other side. Anne, quiet and mousey, sat across the table. She had always been envious of her older sister, even though much of the attention Elisabeth received was the result of her frail, often sickly constitution. The sibling rivalry for boys was a more direct contest and one in which Elisabeth had a decided edge, to the consternation of Anne. Elisabeth was forever falling in and out of love, and it came as no surprise when she developed a crush on Lindbergh. So had Anne and, for that matter, Constance.
As the holiday vacation in Mexico progressed, Elisabeth’s ability to communicate with Lindbergh, who seemed to pay no attention to Anne or to her opinions, roused old anxieties in the middle sister. Of one particular dinner at which Lindbergh seemed transfixed by what Elisabeth was saying, Anne wrote of being sick of heartbreak and of her odious envy of Elisabeth, her confidence, her forceful charm, the fact that people seemed to notice her more, her quick wit. She felt achoke with misery, that she was of no use, no value, had nothing to offer Lindbergh or anyone.17 Others seemed to think Lindbergh fancied Elisabeth, and rumors to this effect were to persist long after the holidays.
Sickness was a subject the family, and especially Mrs. Morrow, tended to downplay and possibly could not fully come to grips with. Dwight often worked to the point of exhaustion, which may have contributed to his contracting pneumonia just before Christmas of 1912. There were hints of congenital illness on his side of the family, and coworkers at both Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett (the law firm at which he was a partner prior to joining Morgan and Company), and the house of Morgan tried to obscure the fact that he suffered from prolonged spells of “diffidence” (which is to say, depression and nervous fatigue). Fragile Elisabeth was afflicted with a wide variety of ailments, many of which were not specified even in the family diaries and correspondence. What no one seemed to have wanted to admit was the possibility that both Dwight and his daughter Elisabeth, the child closest to him in temperament, had chronic neurological disorders.18
What could not be obscured was Dwight Jr.’s nervous breakdown. It occurred in January of 1928 at Amherst College. Elisabeth rushed to his side and stayed with him for much of the winter. When the family went back to Mexico, Elisabeth stayed behind to tend to Dwight Jr., who had requested she be with him.
In 1928, Charles Lindbergh came to visit the Morrows in the United States, and little attention was paid when he took Anne flying. It was Elisabeth in the plane with him, or anywhere else, that set tongues talking. Even sprightly Anne believed the Flying Colonel was taken by her sister, and she was not happy. Anne was madly in love with the handsome twenty-six-year-old world idol, whom she referred to as a “shy, cool boy” and agonized over. By midsummer, word of a Lindy-Elisabeth wedding was building. By October, Elisabeth was in Europe, recuperating from a bout of bronchial pneumonia. In Manhattan on November 21, newsmen and photographers boarded the ocean liner S.S. Olympic, which was returning from Cherbourg, France, and besieged Elisabeth with questions regarding her betrothal to Lindbergh. She would neither confirm nor deny the rumors nor discuss her plans. Elisabeth did agree to pose for pictures in her stateroom, and the news photographers managed to get shots of her before J. P. Morgan, Jr., in whose party she was traveling, barged in and ordered the media out. United Press and the International Newsreel Photo Service issued stories and photographs of Elisabeth that appeared across the country, saying that she was reported engaged to marry Colonel Lindbergh.19 But by now Anne was quietly seeing Lindbergh, so quietly that in an October 21 letter to Constance she asked her baby sister not to tell their mother of the budding romance.20
Perhaps due in part to Elisabeth, unquestionably because of the ubiquitous media that hounded him, Charles Lindbergh’s wooing of Anne Morrow began as much of their early married life would be led: surreptitiously. At the onset he taught her, in the name of privacy, how to elude crowds and mislead people, particularly reporters, unless, of course, you needed them. Dwight’s embassy spokesman in Mexico had wasted no time in denying published reports that there was any romance between Lindbergh and “a member of the Morrow family.”21 When Dwight Morrow finally learned that it was Anne, not Elisabeth, who intended to wed the Flying Colonel, his first response, in true patriarchal fashion, was to object.
Following her return to America and the public denial of her engagement to Lindbergh, Elisabeth once again fell ill and was under a doctor’s care. Whether the affliction continued to be bronchial pneumonia appeared unclear, but its severity was greatly understated to her mother, a woman who had a difficult time comprehending and coping with family maladies. In a late-November letter from Mexico, where she and her parents were spending Thanksgiving, Anne urged that sickly Elisabeth not even undertake the relatively short journey from the Leffingwells’ Long Island estate, where she was convalescing, to the Morrow home in Englewood. Anne’s previous letter had intimated a budding romance with Lindbergh—he was referred to in the text by the code name Boyd. The November letter again alluded to the relationship, almost unmindful that delicate Elisabeth was also infatuated with the young aviator.22
The printed correspondence from Anne to Elisabeth changed drastically. The letters, which for so long had contained the breathless and often rambling intimacies of two close sisters, became quite impersonal, if not formal. Also, there were fewer of them, at least in the published collections of Anne’s correspondence and diaries, which from late 1928 until July 2, 1929, showed no communication at all.
For Harry Green, Harold Hoffman, or any of the investigators trying to home in on Elisabeth’s background and potentially violent reaction to Lindbergh’s not marrying her, the diaries would be of little value. The volume covering 1922 to 1928 wouldn’t be published until 1971; the volume covering 1929 to 1932 would reach print in 1973. They never were to know that when Lindbergh and Anne had their first child, Elisabeth suffered a mild heart attack.23
Harry Green contended that Elisabeth had been described to them as an emotionally troubled young woman whose mental problems were exacerbated when Lindbergh proposed to Anne. “The papers said Lindbergh was going to marry Elisabeth,” Green told the author. “He chose Anne instead, and Elisabeth never recovered from the shock. She couldn’t contain her humiliation and hatred.” The governor was told that odd events had occurred at the Morrow mansion, in which the staff was sure Elisabeth had a hand. Anne’s dog had been killed mysteriously. Elisabeth loved animals, but the servants suspected it was she. There was also the matter of the baby’s being found in the trash closet of the Morrow home. “Someone had thrown him out with the trash. One of the servants found him in there,” said Green. “There was a problem with sending the baby to school, too.”24
Enrolling Charles Jr. at the Montessori-type school Elisabeth had founded in Englewood allegedly created a controversy in the Morrow household. Anne objected on the pretext that the infant was too young. Her mother insisted that he go, for the sake of family harmony, and as usual Mother got her way. Older children at the school picked on baby Charles, kicked him, pulled his hair. Mrs. Morrow refused to let him quit. Elisabeth often accompanied the infant back and forth from the Morrow estate. Then one day the servants were told that Elisabeth was never to be left alone with the Eaglet. It happened anyway.
The first two volumes of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s diaries and letters, Bring Me a Unicorn and Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, were published in 1971 and 1973, respectively, and covered the years from 1922 to 1932. That the author
would display prudence in her choice of material is understandable, even more so since she quotes an early bit of advice received from her husband to be regarding the press, which says in effect that you should never say anything you wouldn’t want shouted from housetops, nor write anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front pages of a newspaper.25 Still and all, the reprinted letters and diary entries provide interesting insights into her relationship with Elisabeth. The earlier volume details their competitiveness with boys and their mutual infatuation with Charles Lindbergh when he came to visit their father in Mexico City over the Christmas holiday of 1927. Anne’s letters to Elisabeth, which had exuded the confidences that only two close sisters can exchange, became cool and diffident in the wake of Lindbergh’s entering their lives.
As the fiancée and then bride of Charles Lindbergh, Anne, the shy middle daughter of the Morrow clan, was coming into her own, and it seems reasonable that she had less time or concern for sisterly matters, which could account for the drop-off in correspondence with Elisabeth. But there is no diminution in the letters Anne wrote to Constance. Bring Me a Unicorn, which covers the essentially non-Lindbergh period from 1922 to 1928, includes twenty-five letters Anne sent to Elisabeth and twenty-four she wrote to Constance. Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead comprises the 1929–32 time frame, during which Anne became engaged to, and married, Lindbergh, gave birth, flew north to the Orient, and suffered the death of her child. Here there are slightly more letters to Constance than in the previous book, twenty-seven, whereas the number of letters to Elisabeth drops to eleven, less than half the number found in the first volume. By the same token, the number of letters Anne wrote to her mother falls from thirty-four in the first book to nineteen in the second.
Only six letters from Anne to Elisabeth are reprinted for the period between June of 1929 and the end of 1931.26 By then Dwight Morrow’s sudden death had brought the Lindberghs back to America, where the construction of the Hopewell estate was nearing completion. Their child disappeared from the new home on March 1, 1932. The first letter for 1932 from Anne to her older sister that appears in Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead was written seventeen days later, on Mach 18. It is the book’s first communication with Elisabeth since October of 1931 and possibly the first message from Anne since the death of her son.