Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  As if inspired by her parents’ happiness, Anne danced the jarabe in the ballroom after dinner.8 To the sound of trumpets and the beat of maracas, her heels clicked and her red skirt twirled and her black, braided wig flew out behind her. At the end, Anne thrust her hat on the floor and danced triumphantly on its brim. The crowd broke into the Mexican anthem and a lively chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  The timing of Anne’s dance seemed less than accidental. Charles Lindbergh was scheduled to arrive after dinner. The opulence and the joy of the celebration moved him. The wine, the food, the mahogany, and the silver again evoked memories of his childhood on the Mississippi and the life he and his parents had wanted and lost. This was the Morrow family at its best, choreographed with precision by Betty. During her year at the embassy, Betty had cultivated a style of her own—proper and sophisticated, interlaced with strands of Latin custom and culture. The soft sounds of a New England Christmas meshed with the brash cheer of a Mexican band.

  Still flushed by her scarlet dance, Anne was ushered by Charles into an empty room. There, amid the faint sounds of Mexico, Charles asked for reassurance that she would marry him. Although they had told Anne’s parents of their betrothal, they did not yet want a public announcement. But because it was two months since their decision, Charles feared that Anne had doubts.

  He was right. Despite Anne’s initial consent, she was unconvinced that either one of them was ready to marry. She had resigned herself to a conventional life; she wanted to write and she wanted to marry, but she wanted a husband who shared her interests, a man so close to her in “mind, spirit, and understanding,” he would feel like “home.”9 For the first time, she had met a man who understood her, and it was frightening. Charles saw the rebel heart inside the timid girl, and his piercing eye both pleased and threatened her. She knew that, with Charles, her ambitions could run free and her deepest instincts would be valued. But she also knew that marriage to the “hero” would change her life forever, and there would be no turning back.

  But why, she wondered, had her parents accepted her betrothal to Lindbergh when her own wishes had counted for nothing? Why as his appendage was she suddenly whole? Her doubts grew as much from fear as from confusion and the feeling that she simply had no choice.10

  How could Anne refuse to marry Charles Lindbergh? Could she tell her parents that he didn’t read enough books? Could she justify a career in writing or teaching instead of being Lindbergh’s wife and co-pilot? And then there was his physical beauty, the beauty she could not stop thinking or writing about—his tall, muscular body, his sandy hair, which seemed to “laugh,” his hands and wrists, which burst with vitality. Most of all, it was the intensity of his eyes; they did not “seem his nor any man’s but as though many bright skies and clear horizons were behind them.”11

  The Morrows had not been surprised by Lindbergh’s proposal. It was Anne’s indecision that bewildered them. They took their usual January vacation in Nassau and, on its white beaches, had weighed the prospect of Anne’s marriage to Charles. Anne and Elisabeth sat in the sun, eating tomato sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise, and talking incessantly of love and heroes. Elisabeth took a maternal view of Anne’s soul-baring honesty, feeling at once the intensity of her confusion and wondering when she would have the courage to make up her mind.12 It may have puzzled Anne that Elisabeth wasn’t jealous. Perhaps, for the first time, Elisabeth confided the depth of her feelings for Connie, and Anne understood Elisabeth’s need to pull away.

  While Anne wallowed in indecision, Lindbergh held to a clever strategy. He kept his silence and did not call or write, leaving Anne to deal alone with her uncertainty. As a result, she missed him twice as much.13

  In January 1929 the Morrow family had other concerns. Dwight Morrow’s political ambitions were thwarted by President Herbert Hoover’s unwillingness to appoint him secretary of state. Hoover feared that if Mellon were secretary of the treasury and Morrow secretary of state, his administration would be viewed as “big business government.” The matter was explained in the press as Mexico’s continuing need for Morrow in a time of crisis, but the truth behind his failure to obtain the appointment slowly surfaced.14

  Suddenly, in the midst of the publicity, the Morrows received a call from the headmaster of Groton. Dwight Jr. had had another breakdown.15 Immediately, Betty and Dwight took the train to New York and set off in their private car for Pittsfield, Massachusetts. On January 30 they rode twelve miles in subzero weather to Stockbridge, where Dwight had been taken to a rest home.16

  Once again, Dwight Jr.’s illness held Betty and Dwight hostage. They lived as though the events of their lives were disconnected from the mental torture of their son. Yet the emotional instability of Dwight Jr. served as a barometer to the pressures in their lives. Anne’s betrothal to Charles Lindbergh and Morrow’s ascendance in the political arena exacerbated Dwight Jr.’s conflicts. Behind the scenes, he played ragtime to their melody, forcing his parents to appraise their vulnerability—to reflect on both their standards and their ambition. Morrow’s letters to his son during the following months alternated between endearing words of encouragement and grim lectures on moral conduct, obviating the possibility of true emotional exchange. To Morrow, virtue and sanity were the same—a moral debt owed to ourselves, our friends, the community, and God. Like a preacher shaking his finger at his wayward flock, he listed the hallmarks of a virtuous life: self-restraint, knowledge, integrity, courage, and excellence within the limits of one’s ability.17

  Anne too had a debt to pay. She had kept Lindbergh waiting another month. As if her decision were nothing less than a gift, on February 3, one day before Lindbergh’s twenty-seventh birthday, Anne gave her consent. In the end, logic and reason meant nothing; preconception and fear slipped away. All that remained was her love for Charles. Never had she met anyone “so fine, so clear, so utterly good, so real.”18 Their marriage was a matter of fate.

  Anne had wanted a quiet intellectual life, unlike her parents’ fast-moving pace. But now she was doomed to follow Lindbergh across the continents of time and space. She wrote to her friend Corliss Lamont: “Don’t wish me happiness … Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor—I will need them all.”19

  Released from the grip of indecision, Anne was suddenly eager to give the “news to the world.” Nine days later, Dwight Morrow announced from his private office at the embassy in Mexico the engagement of Anne Spencer Morrow to Charles Augustus Lindbergh.20 The notice was handed to foreign correspondents and disseminated to newspapers throughout the world.

  In the left-hand column of the first page of the New York Times, upstaging the 280,000 people who had congregated in St. Peter’s Square to pay homage to the Pope, the headline read: COLONEL LINDBERGH BETROTHED TO MISS ANNE S. MORROW.21

  The announcement of the engagement surprised some, inspired others, and elicited global expressions of congratulations. Lindbergh’s friends in St. Louis were stunned. “Girls,” they said, “had never interested ‘Slim.’”22

  But if his social reluctance seemed odd to his colleagues, it was the stuff of royalty to the foreign eye. The United States minister to Canada, William Phillips, saw Lindbergh’s social restraint as a princely virtue: “Colonel Lindbergh occupies a perfectly unique position in our country, very much like the Prince of Wales in Great Britain and Canada, because he represents to us, as does the Prince of Wales to you, all that is finest in man.”23

  The public response to Lindbergh’s choice as bride was uniform and unequivocal. Anne Morrow was portrayed as the perfect mate for the perfect hero. She was “proper” in demeanor, newspapers wrote, “moderate” in taste and inclination, “beautiful,” and “demure.”

  The New York Times reported that Anne was the Morrows’ “second daughter,” that she was Presbyterian, “like her father and her family,” and that she had a commitment to both academic study and domesticity.24 It added that she was a good student without being “a grind”25 and, though
she was not athletic, she conformed to notions of “prudent” activity.

  This “sweet, quiet, and attractive girl,” it stated, was slender; her luxuriant brown hair framed “very large and pansy-colored” eyes. Furthermore, she was a brilliant, prize-winning authoress.26

  Restrained yet ambitious, intelligent yet beautiful, Anne was the epitome of Victorian womanhood, the consummate bride for the consummate man. For the moment, in the midst of public acclaim, Anne was transformed. To her family, Anne looked more radiant and beautiful than ever.27 But she was already paying a price for her decision to marry the boy-hero who conducted his life like a fishing trip. For ten days, she sat alone in the embassy without so much as a word from Charles. Daily, the servants brought her the newspapers that reported his itinerary, his whereabouts, and his safety.28 Anne’s fears had come to pass. She had lost control of her life. Betrothed to the Prince, she had become his handmaiden, obediently awaiting his return.

  6

  The Mermaid’s Bargain

  Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh in Mexico City, 1929.(AP/Wide World Photos)

  THE LITTLE MERMAID

  Only the little mermaid knows the price

  One pays for mortal love, what sacrifice…

  The magic sweetness of a mermaid’s song,

  She must abandon, if she would belong

  To mortal world, the gift—of fatal choice—

  That would have won the Prince, her golden voice.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH1

  FEBRUARY 1929, MEXICO CITY

  Reporters surrounded the American Embassy, swooping like vultures in search of prey, hoping to catch the perfect vignette, the symbolic gesture, the definitive glance. The Morrows had thought they understood fame, but the adulation of the Mexican people, consumed by political chaos, bore no resemblance to the idolatry that now began to envelop them. The public wanted to possess Lindbergh—even at the expense of Lindbergh himself. And the Morrows were part of the spoils.

  Hundreds of letters and telegrams made their way to the embassy, congratulating Betty and Dwight on their daughter’s engagement. When Charles returned to the United States for “a maiden voyage” of the new Latin America mail routes of Pan Am Airways, Anne stayed in Mexico with her parents. Day after day, she sat at her desk, responding to those with familiar names, hiding her frustration beneath the jargon of etiquette and social amenity. More than anything, she wanted to be worthy of her parents’ legacy and live up to the standards set by Charles Lindbergh. But there was a piece of Anne that wondered whether Lindbergh could measure up to her. The initial relief that came with her decision had quickly faded again into doubt. She whose life was defined by contemplation and study, she who thrived on sharing her thoughts with her sisters and analyzing her experiences in her diary, was suddenly unable to write or to move freely. Still, she tried to put on a strong face for Charles.

  On Valentine’s Day, 1929, she wrote him a letter hoping to put his mind at ease, but her anger seeped through to its surface. His absence had put an unfair burden on her, and she confided her fears and her loneliness. Everything, she wrote, seemed “horribly unreal” and her doubts seemed ridiculous when everyone was telling her how lucky she was.2 But more than anything, she resented Charles’s warning not to write letters.3 It was as if he had sucked the life out of her—writing was her only way of keeping perspective. Now her words, if leaked to the press, could be used against them.

  Yet Anne had a gnawing fear that even if she were to write, Charles would not hear her. She feared that their differences—their needs and ways of loving—would have no common ground.4

  Yet whenever she remembered his eyes, their beauty and intensity left her without a choice.5 But where were they? Lindbergh came and went at will. Except from newspaper reports, Anne had no idea where he was. Her finest instincts suddenly seemed wrong or dangerous. Moments of solitude, once filled with “dark creativity,” did not bring her solace. Nothing had any substance. She was an image, a plaything of the press, and even those close to her found it difficult to be sympathetic. She had, after all, won the prize.6

  After two weeks, which seemed to Anne like years, Charles sent notice of his arrival. Hoping to outrun the press, the Morrow family packed their bags to meet Charles at their mountain retreat in Cuernavaca.

  After eleven hours in the air from El Paso to Mexico City, Charles motored by car from the embassy, arriving at the Morrow home at nine that evening. Looking delightfully ruffled and carefree, he seemed eager to be alone with Anne. They climbed up to the mirador and talked in the moonlight, happy just to be together again.7 The whole family reveled in Charles’s presence as they watched the couple sit together, heads bent close, nodding intently, just like lovers about to be married.8

  After two days of dealing with family and reporters, Anne and Charles were eager for time alone. Secretly, they planned a day of flying into the mountains and the valleys beyond. On February 27, Charles rose early to speak with correspondents. Observers noted that he was more reticent and evasive than usual. Later that morning, Anne and Charles took an embassy car to Valbuena airport and flew off, unannounced, in a borrowed Travelair cabin monoplane.

  Once in flight, they set their course for the desolate prairieland beyond the city, where they could picnic alone. On the way home, Anne took the controls while Charles surveyed the land below. He noticed that a wheel had fallen off the plane, and feared that the axle would catch the ground and capsize the plane when they tried to land. Anticipating the danger of explosion on impact, he reduced the gasoline on board by flying around for several hours. Aware that he and Anne would be tossed around the cabin, Charles put Anne in the back seat, padded her with a big flying suit and cushion, and told her to open the windows and hold on to the seat bottom. He planned to fly the controls with one hand and grip the fuselage with the other. An attempt to land on one wheel did not work; as he had anticipated, the plane caught the ground and accelerated forty miles an hour through the thin mountain air.9

  Anne was certain this was a test she had to pass, and she was certain, if she failed, he would think her a coward.10 But the test came and went without her notice. Anne emerged from the aircraft frightened but unscathed; Charles, unshaken, had dislocated his shoulder. Who and what had been tested was a matter of opinion. For Anne, it was a test of her trust in Charles. For Betty Morrow, it was a test of how well Charles could protect her daughter. But for Charles, it was a test of the future of aviation. From the moment he left the plane, he was careful to assuage the fears of the anxious public. As rescuers helped him out of the cockpit, he grinned and clutched his injured right shoulder. Pale beneath his deep Mexican tan, aware that his words would echo around the world, he called the crash a minor “mishap” that might have happened to anyone.11 “Mishap.” It was a new word for Anne, and a new way of talking about her experience. She too would have to choose her words.

  Anne smiled tentatively as Charles answered the reporters’ questions. Taking her by the arm, Charles led her toward the hangar, several hundred yards away, but as they went to their car, the reporters turned to Anne.

  “How do you feel?” they asked.

  “Augustus will speak for me,”12 Anne answered, shielding herself behind Charles. In one nearly invisible moment, by using Lindbergh’s royal middle name,13 Anne had defined her public stance. Her own words would not suffice. From now on Charles would be her voice. It was one more price she paid for her Prince.

  As the public response began to reach a crescendo, Charles knew he had to act quickly. That night, with his shoulder and arm bandaged, he and Anne returned to the site of the crash. Three days later, they went flying again.14

  The public was enthusiastic. “Lindy” was praised for his social commitment and Anne and her parents for their indomitable courage. Will Rogers summed it up:

  So bravo, Lindy: You are bigger tonight than you ever was before, and that’s saying a lot. And bravo, little Miss Anne, you have helped aviation more today than you
will ever know. And Mr. and Mrs. Morrow, bless your hearts for your splendid help. That’s why you gave your daughter to him, because you knew he could take care of her.15

  While “Little Miss Anne” was at a loss for words, Betty Morrow was suddenly prolific. In the days following Anne and Charles’s engagement, Betty’s entries in her stark, shopping-list diary became self-conscious literary essays, alive with detail and local color. The regime of President Calles had been threatened by revolt, and with uncharacteristic interest, Betty probed its meaning as if she had taken her place in history. She accused Calles of starting a revolution and conducting himself like a dictator. Betty felt like a prisoner of Mexico—none of them could leave the country now.16

  In the national election of 1928, Calles was precluded from succeeding himself as president, according to the 1917 constitution. He had stepped aside for Alvaro Obregón, a radical reformer and political ally who, as president from 1920 to 1924, had carried the country through the bloodiest years of the civil war to prosperity. When Obregón was assassinated by a religious fanatic who resented his anticlerical views, Calles formed the National Revolutionary Party and appointed himself its leader.

  But the revolution had an unintended consequence. It distracted the press from Anne and Charles and had the salutary effect of locking Charles into the Morrows’ country retreat for nearly three weeks. Anne and Charles spent more time together during those weeks than in the fifteen months since they had met. Lindbergh’s presence, however, set the household on edge. Constrained inside the country villa, Charles seemed to explode with energy, tearing through the rooms like a runaway train.17

  Elisabeth’s loneliness became more intense with Lindbergh’s presence, and she poured it out in letters to Connie. She too was a target of publicity and a never-ending slave to embassy propriety. Most of all, she was crazy with boredom. Tired of parties and the social scene, Elisabeth wanted to teach in the nearby Catholic orphanage. She complained of intestinal grippe and low spirits; only Connie assuaged her loneliness. Unlike Anne, who doubted that Charles was listening, Elisabeth knew that she was being heard.