The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

LINDBERGH DUTIFULLY FIELDED questions from the press, but the one thing he bridled at was inquiries about his personal life. Women reporters in particular tended to ask him about love, marriage, girlfriends, and so on. His standard answer was a scornful, “What’s that got to do with aviation?”19 No one would ever have suggested he was gay, but neither could the gossip writers explain why, unlike, say, Eddie Rickenbacker who for a time always seemed to have a girl on either arm, the preposterously handsome Lindbergh was strictly a lone wolf.

  Despite his reserve, however, love soon would come into Lindbergh’s life in a most surprising way. From the outset he had attracted the attention of Dwight Morrow, a powerful lawyer, future U.S. senator, and senior partner at J. P. Morgan’s formidable Wall Street banking firm. Morrow had chaired the eminent airpower commission known as the Morrow Board, convened in 1925 by President Coolidge in the wake of the Billy Mitchell controversy, which resulted in the creation of a separate U.S. Army Air Corps within the army. It was also Morrow who had suggested to Harry Guggenheim that the aviation foundation pay Lindbergh $50,000 to do a U.S. aviation promotion tour.f In return, Lindbergh put all of his money in the hands of Morgan’s investment bankers.

  Lindbergh and Morrow had met at the president’s dinner the day Lindbergh arrived in Washington from Europe, and Morrow had invited the attractive young aviator to visit at his stately home in Englewood, New Jersey. At some point before going on his tour, Lindbergh accepted the invitation, and there was a fleeting introduction to Morrow’s three daughters, whom he scarcely remembered but all of whom, and one in particular, would remember him, for she would become his wife.20

  The same summer that Lindbergh embarked on his goodwill tour, President Coolidge tapped Dwight Morrow as ambassador to Mexico. Long considered a diplomatic backwater, the Mexico that Morrow was now charged with overseeing had become highly important to the United States. There were vast U.S. mining interests there (chiefly Guggenheim’s) as well as enormous oil discoveries by American companies, while Mexico remained, as usual, in a state of eternal war. A year earlier its current president, Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary with Marxist leanings, had begun a war of extermination against the Catholic Church, murdering Catholic priests and razing churches and cathedrals—all of that aside, of course, from the run-of-the-mill rape and pillage that accompanied any Mexican revolution. Morrow decided that to draw the spirit of the Mexican people closer to the United States, nothing could be better than an official visit by the most popular fellow in the world, Charles Lindbergh, American. Lindbergh readily agreed, and not only would he come to Mexico, he said, he would make the occasion even more memorable by setting a new record—a nonstop flight to Mexico City from Washington, D.C.! When Morrow protested that because of the mountains it was too dangerous, the newly minted colonel told him, “You get me the invitation, and I’ll take care of the flying.”21

  A LITTLE AFTER NOON on December 13, 1927, the Spirit of St. Louis took off from Bolling Field in Washington. Everything went well throughout the night and until the next afternoon when Lindbergh entered the Valley of Mexico and found it blanketed in fog. He had prepared a map that outlined rail lines but was having trouble matching the map with the tracks on the ground. Like many a pilot, Lindbergh swooped down to get a peek at the names of the towns on the railroad stations along the tracks but became baffled when each town he passed was named “Caballeros.” Only later did he discover that he had been reading the signs for men’s rooms.22

  After wandering off course for several hours, Lindbergh at last got his bearings and landed at Mexico City’s airport, which was mobbed by at least 150,000 cheering Mexicans. President Calles himself handed Lindbergh the keys to the city. It had taken twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes. On the way from the airport to the embassy the exuberant Mexicans nearly buried Lindbergh in flowers and bombarded him with invitations to every kind of Mexican entertainment from parades to bullfights to rodeos.

  It was the Christmas season and the Morrows asked Lindbergh to spend the holidays with them at the embassy. They even arranged for his mother to come down on the train to San Antonio, where she would take a plane to Mexico City. Of the three Morrow girls, Lindbergh spent time bantering with the gregarious fourteen-year-old Constance, and warmed up to the beautiful twenty-three-year-old Elisabeth, but his world began to change, imperceptibly at first, with the arrival of twenty-one-year-old Anne Morrow. She had come home for Christmas from her senior year at Smith College.

  Beneath her somewhat fragile-looking exterior, Anne was a tower of determination and brave as a bull. She was petite with a reserved beauty set off by a wide smile beneath a prominent nose,g keen, luminous eyes, and dark, silky hair that she kept short in the sort of rolled pageboy fashion of the 1920s. She also kept a diary in a perceptive writing style that belied her age and experience.

  “I saw standing against a great stone pillar … a tall, slim boy in evening dress—so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected,” she wrote. “A very refined face, not at all like those grinning ‘Lindy’ pictures—a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color … He did not smile, just bowed and shook hands.”23

  It was Anne’s first time in her new home at the embassy, and she found the experience “intoxicating,” with its enormous flower-filled rooms and “baronial” hall. “Why is it,” she asked her diary after she found herself included in a sitting room with Lindbergh and her sisters, “that attractive men stimulate Elisabeth to her best and always terrify me and put me at my worst!?… Colonel L. stood awkwardly by a desk, shifting from one foot to another. Elisabeth talked.

  “He was very young and terribly shy,” she continued, “looked straight ahead and talked in straight direct sentences which came out abruptly and clipped. You could not meet his sentences; they were statements of fact, presented with such honest directness … It was amazing—breathtaking. I could not speak. What kind of boy was this?”24

  That night she could not sleep well as she “tried to comprehend, tried to analyze, the popularity of this man.” It wasn’t so much what Lindbergh had done, she wondered to her diary, “it must be either that he is the symbol of the most beautiful achievement of our age … or is it just personal magnetism? For everyone does feel immediately, I think, silenced and amazed at this man.” Clearly then, after a day, Anne Morrow was smitten but, typically, she kept telling herself she didn’t have a chance—especially against her taller and more beautiful older sister, Elisabeth.

  After Christmas, Lindbergh set off on a goodwill aviation tour of South America and the Caribbean, and Anne Morrow set her jib for him. In the waning days after Christmas she made a point of paying particular attention to his mother, Evangeline, a fact that was not lost on Evangeline’s son. One afternoon Lindbergh had taken the ladies of the family for a flight over Mexico City that so thrilled Anne once she was back on the ground she felt compelled to tell her diary, “I will not be happy till it happens again.” And soon the diary filled with poetry—John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters …

  … When first I met

  Your glance and knew

  That life had found me

  And Death too …

  These were heady thoughts for a smart, sensitive, well-educated—and determined—young woman. When she returned to Smith after the holidays, Anne began buying copies of the magazine Popular Aviation at newsstands near the campus and scrutinized a volume about how to fly called Airmen and Aircraft, while trying to explain Lindbergh to herself.

  “The intensity of life, burning like a bright fire in his eyes. Life focused in him—When he in turn focuses his life, power, force, on anything, amazing things happen … he wastes nothing, words, time, thought, emotion … His tremendous power over people—untried for, unconscious … His effect coming into a room, going out. His effect on men … never a false note, a hint of smallness … utter lack of recklessness, an amazing, impersonal kind of courage,” she told her diary, and could have gone on�
�and did—“the way his smile completely changes his face; the small-boy-hands-in-pockets looking-straight-at-you attitude …”

  Even after his lengthy South American tour the world continued to shower honors and money on Charles Lindbergh, including the presentation of the Medal of Honor, bestowed by President Coolidge on behalf of Congress. Time magazine named him its first “Man of the Year” for 1927, and the University of Wisconsin, whose doors he had not darkened since being expelled six years earlier, awarded him an honorary doctorate of law degree.

  In the meantime, Lindbergh was becoming considerably wealthier. He had been asked to come aboard a new aviation company named Transcontinental Air Transport that purported to establish a coast-to- coast air route beginning with ten Ford trimotor single-wing or monoplanes. Lindbergh’s position was chairman of the company’s technical committee, but his name lent enormous prestige to the enterprise.

  In exchange for his services he was given a signing bonus of $250,000 to purchase shares in the company and a yearly salary of $10,000. Transcontinental subsequently became known as “the Lindbergh Line.” Several months later he accepted a similar position at a similar salary with the new Pan American Airways, owned by the legendary Juan Trippe. And within the year Harry Guggenheim had appointed him a consultant to his Aeronautical Foundation at a salary of $25,000 a year. In today’s dollars Lindbergh was taking in nearly $700,000 a year plus stock offers and options, and there were additional advisory or board member positions as the months and years passed.

  For Lindbergh these jobs were no sinecures; he actively advised both companies on all aspects of aviation from engines and toilets to air routes and the laying out of landing fields. He tested new equipment and inspected the personnel, constantly crisscrossing the country, looking for the better way. “Celebrity without purpose seemed pointless to Lindbergh,” wrote his most recent biographer, “and commercial aviation became his crusade.”25

  BACK AT SMITH COLLEGE, Anne visited the airfield near campus after school, quizzing mechanics about planes and the art of flying. One day she even got a pilot to take her and a classmate up for a spin, an experience that left her with “tangled hair, [and] ecstatic.” None of this, however, kept her from excellence in her college work; she was the recipient that year of the Montagu and Jordan prizes for literature and graduated from Smith summa cum laude in the spring of 1928.26

  She spent the rest of the spring and most of the summer telling her diary all the reasons Lindbergh would not want her, e.g., that she was dumb and silly and far too insignificant for the magnificent Colonel Lindbergh, the most eligible bachelor on earth; that her sister Elisabeth was so much prettier and wittier and so on. Then one day he called her at home in New Jersey. He wanted to take her for a plane ride.

  Lindbergh took her first to the fabulous Guggenheim mansion where he was living, because of the press—if they went to any of the regular airfields “we’d be engaged the next day.” So Lindbergh left her there in the fabulous Guggenheim mansion (“Madonnas in every niche … It was priceless—I and all the Madonnas!” she wrote later to her younger sister) with the equally fabulous Guggenheims, Harry and Caroline, while he brought the plane around to Harry’s private landing strip. Meantime, the Guggenheims “horrified” Anne, “with tales of ‘Slim’s’ practical jokes.” (Lindbergh had been known to change the keys on people’s typewriters, give hotfoots, and so forth.)27

  Suddenly, the ice had been broken. “I can’t explain to you, Con, what a change had come in my attitude—just from that hour ride out,” she wrote to her little sister, Constance. I discovered that I could be perfectly natural with him, say anything to him, that I wasn’t a bit afraid of him, or even worshipful any more … He’s just terribly kind and absolutely natural … He’s rather a dear.”28 The courtship of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow began, and by the end of the year he had asked her to marry him.

  Anne had no illusions about what she was getting into. In one sense she was marrying beneath her class—that charmed mid-Atlantic life of private schools and clubs and woodsy manors, with baby carriages and christenings, weddings and formal hunt club balls—but in another sense she was marrying way above it. They spent much of their time in the confines of the Guggenheim mansion, where young Charles and young Anne socialized with the likes of Vanderbilts, Morgans, Whitneys, Rockefellers, Putnams, Roosevelts, and others too swell to mention, all of whom could be trusted to keep a secret.

  To an old friend, Corliss Lamont, son of Thomas Lamont, chairman of J. P. Morgan and Co., Anne wrote of her impending marriage, “It must seem hysterically funny to you, as it did to me, when I consider my opinions on marriage. ‘A safe marriage,’ ‘Things in common,’ ‘A quiet life,’ etc. etc.… Don’t wish me happiness—I don’t expect to be happy; it’s gotten beyond that somehow.” She was headed, she knew full well, into “a life of relentless action! But after all,” she wrote, “what am I going to do about it? After all, there he is, and I’ve got to go. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor—I will need them all.”29 Thus was Anne Morrow swept away by a simple boy from the Midwest on a magic carpet powered by an internal combustion engine.

  THEY WERE MARRIED ON MAY 27, 1929, in a private ceremony at the Morrows’ grand new Georgian manor house, Next Day Hill, in Englewood, New Jersey. Back in February, reporters had been given a cursory engagement announcement with no wedding date. The few guests, consisting of family and close friends, understood that they had been invited to a reception for Lindbergh’s mother and were completely surprised to find themselves witnesses at the wedding of Charles and Anne.

  She wore a white wedding dress with a lace cap and veil and carried a bouquet of spring flowers, larkspur and columbine, picked and arranged by her sister Elisabeth. The Reverend Dr. William Adams Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, conducted the ceremony.30

  Their honeymoon immediately afterward resembled, as much as anything else, a prison break. It had been arranged that they would slip out the back of the house and spirit themselves to a yacht on Long Island Sound, in which they would leisurely cruise to the Morrows’ summer home in Maine. “We escaped in a borrowed car,” Anne wrote. “I seem to remember lying down in the bottom while passing the crowd of reporters at the gate.” They then swapped cars at a friend’s house, donned hats and dark glasses, and motored to the spot on the Sound where they found a dinghy tied to a tree and rowed it out to the thirty-eight-foot boat, named Mouette, a gift to the Lindberghs, which was moored right offshore.h

  By the time news got out about their wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh were motoring far down the Sound, headed to Block Island under cover of darkest night. Meanwhile, when the press people learned they had been foiled, reporters hunted them down like animals.

  When they made Block Island on the second day, even though they remained disguised, the Lindberghs were spotted and revealed. “One man in an open boat circled around us in harbor for seven straight hours, his wake rocking us constantly,” Anne said, “as he shouted demands that we come out on deck and pose for him … I felt like an escaped convict. This was not freedom.”

  They pressed on toward Maine with full fuel and water tanks and an icebox loaded with block ice, dining on fancy canned foods such as pâté de foie gras, exotic fruits, and cases of ginger ale, and they were having the best of honeymooners’ time between the attacks of the reporters, which quickly caused them to flee a comfortable anchorage at the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, harbor and spend a storm-tossed night anchored on a fishing bank in the open ocean, “hearing the dishes crash at every big wave,” all to elude the pestilent press.31

  At last they reached the coast of Maine, only to be assailed by “that terrifying drone of a plane hunting you, and boats,” Anne wrote to her mother, even as a press-hired seaplane hove into view. “I don’t feel angry about it anymore—it is inevitable. But it was a terrible shock to wake up from that blissfully quiet existence of being nobodies … without being followed, stared at, shouted at; to be
waked by the harsh, smirking voice of a reporter outside our window one morning: ‘Is this Colonel Lindbergh’s boat?’ ”32

  THE LIFE THAT THE LINDBERGHS LED was every bit as hectic and exciting as Anne had imagined. Like Eddie Rickenbacker before him, Charles was now the world’s resident guru not only for aviation but seemingly for practically every other matter under the sun.

  Anne was soon infected with Charles’s distaste for the press, all the more so after the running pursuit of their honeymoon cruise. “Never say anything you wouldn’t want shouted from the housetops,” Lindbergh had warned her, “and never write anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of a newspaper.” She had taken these admonishments to heart during their courtship, disguising her letters home and to friends on the suspicion that her mail was being opened, and using code words for Charles (he became Boyd) and for other important events and elements in her life.

  Even though there was plenty of good reason for his antipathy Lindbergh fundamentally misunderstood the press. He believed that the less said the better, on the theory that the reporters would thus have fewer chances to misquote him or misinterpret him. The same went for photographers; both he and Anne began putting on disguises when going out in public to keep from being recognized, and they continued the practice for many years afterward.

  Lindbergh failed to recognize that his very secrecy was what created so much of the unwanted attention by the newspapers. He might have taken a lesson from his contemporary the great Swedish actress Greta Garbo, whose aversion to the press and publicity produced a constant and outsized flurry of activity by the paparazzi of the day.

  Instead, Lindbergh seems to have taken the officious, offensive, and boorish behavior of the newspapermen as a personal affront and any attempt to pry into his personal life as a deliberate insult. He did not seem to grasp that these people—reporters, photographers, editors, etc.—were for the most part merely trying to make a living from their bosses, who were in turn driven by orders from above to keep circulation moving. Eventually, his relations with newspapers degenerated to the extent that he became convinced that America’s founders had erred when they included “freedom of the press” in the First Amendment.