Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Smiling proudly, Dwight escorted Anne through the arc of family and friends toward the fireplace to meet Charles.

  The service, Betty noted, was spare but elegant, and no one seemed to notice Charles’s required changes in the ceremony. The ring was passed in a circle of blessings, from Charles to Betty, then to Minister Brown, and finally back to Charles. Charles, in a plain blue suit, placed it on Anne’s finger. No one, to the public’s chagrin, dared to describe the wedding kiss.

  Nonetheless, the proclamation of marriage was met with a flood of emotion from family and friends, who embraced them with good wishes, hugs, and kisses. Afterward, Anne and Charles cut the cake, and everyone lingered to eat and talk.

  The frosting, wrote Betty, was as hard as cement, and the punch was perfectly awful. Anne, however, noticed little more than the circle of love in her family. To her delight, Charles felt the same.38 To Anne, it was as if his approval confirmed their worth.

  After the reception, Anne returned to her bedroom with her sisters and Betty to change her clothes for the wedding trip. She wore a dark blue traveling dress and a blue hat of felt and straw. Rushing out the door, Anne turned to wave goodbye, stopping one last time to relish the moment. Raising her arms in sad farewell, she steadied herself against the rising summer wind.39

  In a note written to her mother on the day of her wedding, Anne described her feelings upon leaving: “I have a permanent happy solid feeling of holding hands with both you and Charles.”40

  7

  Honeymoon Politics

  Married three months, Anne and Charles make a mail route survey tour for Pan Am through the Caribbean. Trinidad, September 1929.

  (Sygma)

  Within marriage, power is the ability to impose one’s imaginative vision and make it prevail … Love is the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

  —PHYLLIS ROSE, Parallel Lives

  MAY 1929, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  At six-fifteen in the evening, two hours after Anne and Charles had slipped through the cordon of police and reporters with a casual nod, Morrow’s friend Dutch Hulst came motoring down the driveway. He stopped at the gate and said to Fitzpatrick, a young policeman, “Tell the boys that Colonel Lindbergh and Miss Morrow were married by Dr. Brown.”1

  Within the hour, and with an unmistakable air of victory, Dwight Morrow drove down the hill, accompanied by his secretary, A. H. Springer. The car came to a stop and the reporters crowded around to congratulate him and to ask for details of the wedding. Always the gentleman, Morrow apologized for their trouble but refused to discuss particulars. Nodding politely toward his secretary, he informed them that Mr. Springer would explain “everything you want to know.”2

  On Morrow’s departure, Springer pulled from his pocket a stack of duplicate, typewritten slips of paper, which he handed out after reading aloud the message: “Mr. and Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow announce the marriage of their daughter Anne to Charles A. Lindbergh at Englewood, New Jersey, May 27, 1929.3

  “That is all,” he said firmly, and turned back up the hill.

  The reporters scrambled for their cars, and everyone inside the house was jubilant. Elisabeth, Con, and Connie stood in the middle of Elisabeth’s bedroom and screamed at the top of their lungs, just to prove they could.4 With much ingenuity and hard work, the Morrows had beaten the press at its own game and had savored the sweetness of a family wedding beyond the glare of camera lights and gawking mobs.

  If the price of their hoax was to be public derision, the Morrows were more than glad to pay it. The press treated them like thieves who had robbed it of a story, but their friends applauded their cleverness and courage. Hundreds of telegrams arrived at the Morrow estate, singing their praises and wishing the bride and groom a safe journey.

  A tirade of criticism broke out in the newspapers, igniting a national debate about who owned Lindbergh. The issue was a matter of property rights: what constituted public domain? Did Lindbergh, “a Grade A public figure,”5 have the right to remove himself from the adoring American public?

  “We made him,” the reporters railed. “Why won’t he play ball with us?” They admitted that they hadn’t flown his plane across the ocean, but, they reasoned, had it not been for their publicity, Lindbergh would not have become a hero. Furthermore, without the press he would not have met Anne Morrow or started “on the road to riches.”

  The problem, of course, was the element of truth, but it was tantamount to saying that astrologists owned the moon. For the first time, the press had the technology to create a global commodity distinct from the person it represented. The question was not who owned Lindbergh; it was who owned Lindbergh’s public persona. And the answer was becoming eminently clear. The press would tell Lindbergh’s story at its discretion, with or without his knowledge or consent. The Lindberghs, after all, were the best show in town.

  The editors of The New Republic wrote, “Lindy and Anne were a motion picture come true. They convinced every idealistic person that there was some justice in the world, after all.”6 But the line between fantasy and reality had blurred, wrote the editors. The public demanded to be entertained like “a vaudeville audience on a hot summer afternoon.” Its inability to empathize with the “beleaguered” pair would stir up this kind of rebellion, but it was exactly the family’s secrecy, warned the editors, that would excite their predators.

  Alone on their honeymoon yacht, Anne and Charles had little knowledge of the public commotion they had caused. They sailed up Long Island Sound and up the waters of the New England coast on a thirty-eight-foot motorboat, the Mouette, French for “seagull,” borrowed from their friend Harold Bixby, one of the backers of Charles’s transatlantic flight. Working in the hull of the boat in the heat of midday, Anne was not thinking about their public image. She was trying to make sense of Charles’s notions of marine “housekeeping.” She spent most of her time arranging cans and boxes of food in the ship’s pantry. She could understand neither the purpose of her task nor the absurd amounts of gourmet food—shrimp, pâté de foie gras, even plum pudding.7 Either Charles expected an impending disaster or a formal dinner party for twelve—in any case, she was certain they would never run out of food.

  Intent upon laying down his rules from the beginning, Charles Lindbergh played his honeymoon like an upscale version of an army boot camp. The press may have cast him in the role of romantic lover, but Charles drew on the only example of intimacy he had ever known—father and son on a camping trip in the woods. And while Anne had a visceral sense that something was wrong, as usual she blamed herself. She wondered why she was dissatisfied at spending the whole day cleaning the boat. The completion of her daily tasks did give her a feeling of self-sufficiency, she wrote home; the problem was that the chores were never-ending. Charles navigated the boat while Anne played the docile housewife, cooking meals and washing dishes, mopping the floors and the decks, making the bed and cleaning the bathroom, only to begin again the next morning. Charles’s demands were strange, and yet, at the same time, “natural.” Nonetheless, she didn’t feel like a bride. In fact, she didn’t feel female at all. She felt more like Charles’s “little boy.”8

  Even as Charles was training Anne as a petty officer, Anne was brewing a mutinous plan. Before she left, she had packed a book of poetry, a collection of ditties and pleasant poems; something unintimidating that she thought would capture Charles’s attention. On a quiet morning, with the yacht at anchor, Anne seated Charles on a deck chair in the sun and read to him. “He was bored to tears,” Anne later said. She was about to give up when he grabbed the book and leafed through it. To Anne’s surprise and pleasure, he chose a romantic poem by a A. E. Housman and read it aloud. “Never underestimate the basic instincts of a fine mind,” she later told a friend. “Even if it is uneducated.”9

  Back in Englewood, Betty settled into her rigorous social routine, and Elisabeth welcomed the solitude of the empty house. Sitting on the floor of her room, in the shadow
of her four-poster bed, she wrote to Connie, apologizing for her dreadful behavior during the days before the wedding, and reminding Connie that life was good even in the face of adversity. Life could play tricks that were cruel, not funny. The only satisfaction for the soul, she concluded, was to search for truth and beauty.10

  The cruel joke, of course, was that Elisabeth was alone. In spite of her acknowledged beauty and cultivated mind, the “golden girl” of the Morrow family was facing the prospect of spinsterhood. Elisabeth knew she was different from Anne. She felt different, in fact, from most women—less desirous of men, more fragile, more lonely, and certainly more ambitious. She would not settle for an ordinary marriage, like so many of her friends and millions of women. For the first time, as if exchanging one dream for another, she articulated the idea of establishing a school.11

  At the age of twenty-five, Elisabeth saw a school as a surrogate family. Her only escape from her parents’ gilded cage was to play the system against itself, converting her wealth and social standing into tools of influence and revolt. And in 1929, establishing a nursery school for the rich was an act of rebellion. Such schools may have been considered suitable for the poor and orphaned, but “progressive” upper-class nursery schools were seen as radical institutions. They took children away from their mothers and homes, challenging the families’ mores and structure. Steeped in John Dewey’s belief in developing the individual child, progressive schools wrested power from the parents and handed it to professional educators, who had redefined their roles. No longer taskmasters whipping the wayward, teachers were the “guides” and “co-workers” of the child. For Elisabeth, this was a petticoat insurrection clothed in the patrician culture of her parents. It was an attempt to give children the voice and autonomy that neither she nor her siblings had had.12

  The same ordinary people who chilled Elisabeth with their meaningless lives now heatedly awaited news of her sister. For more than a week, the press cruised the coast by air and boat from the Long Island Sound to the coast of Maine, searching for the celebrated newlyweds.

  On June 4, the Lindberghs’ honeymoon came to a swift end when a big yellow flying boat swooped down past their yacht as it nosed into the harbor at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. Anne disappeared into the cabin, and Charles, sun-tanned and relaxed in his white duck trousers and open shirt, remained at the wheel. As he approached the wharf, a reporter and a cameraman cornered him. For a week, Anne and Charles had lived like “nobodies,” moving and drifting as they pleased, but now the hunt that had started at Englewood was resumed with a vengeance. Hundreds of planes and boats surged up the New England coast to find them. For three or four days, they raced their pursuers out into the open sea, daring to anchor only at night along the fishing banks. To make matters worse, the weather had turned stormy, and the waves crashing around their yacht threw them out of their bunk at night. Anne confessed that it wasn’t terribly comfortable, but she did not succumb to seasickness.13

  After several days, Charles managed to outrun the press. Free again to move at leisure, they meandered through the small islands off the coast of Maine and then set out for home. Retracing their path down the New England coast, they arrived in New York—tanned, rested, and resigned to the demands of their adoring public.

  After checking into the Berkshire Hotel on June 18, Anne wrote to her mother that they would awaken early the next day for their first public appearance together at a Long Island aviation show. She dreaded the ceremony and the mobs and the constant stalking of photographers and reporters. Nonetheless, she was content to do it for Charles.14

  A week later, having completed business in New York and paid a short visit to Englewood, Anne and Charles set out to inspect and inaugurate the new transcontinental air and rail route for TAT airlines, for which Charles was a technical adviser. In an open Curtis-Falcon biplane, they flew across four states in three days—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana—through rain and a thick fog that brought “cold terror” to Anne. When they stopped to inspect the transfer station at Columbus, Ohio, Anne was struck by the homage paid to Charles. Always an observer, but never so close, she had not understood that Charles was treated like a king. Teasingly referring to him as Charlemagne, she wrote to her mother that no one could bend too deep or fawn too much in his presence.

  When they were alone, however, the thrill of flying was unimaginable. The beauty of flying two thousand feet above the hills of Pennsylvania and the lush farmlands of Ohio catapulted her into a wonderland, where nothing made sense and everything was possible.

  As she slipped into the rhythm of flight, her eyes became a lens through which, perhaps for the first time, the metaphysics of flight were defined by a woman. Anne wrote narratives in her head, later putting them on paper in her letters home. She compared the swirl of clouds and the prisms of light to religious visions, and described the configurations of sea and land with the breathless excitement of a child. Her lack of scientific knowledge and her aesthetic perception infused her experience with poignancy and innocence, transforming description into poetry. Anne recorded her vision, from eight thousand feet, of their arrival in St. Louis. In the half-light of a darkened night, she watched the Missouri and Mississippi converge. The two great rivers “joined, broad, peaceful and gleaming, between the dark shores.”15

  The press followed their voyage closely, referring to Anne alternately as “bride” and “passenger.” She, in fact, was beginning to feel like a partner to Charles—unequal, certainly, but nonetheless a protégée, capable of learning anything he could teach. Merely being with him made her confident; when he was behind her, she stood straight and tall. Alone for hours on long-distance flights, they passed notes to each other, playing like schoolchildren on summer holiday.

  From St. Louis they flew west to Kansas City on July 1, to Wichita two days later, and then on to Albuquerque and Winslow in New Mexico.

  “It was an education in America,” Anne later said. She had read Willa Cather and books about the plains, but there was an excitement about seeing the West firsthand that was beyond her expectation. The rich, fertile farmland sprawled beneath her, and she marveled at the tiny houses clustered beside the winding lattice of railroad tracks and at the rivers that cut like silver streaks through the prairies and farmlands. Charles loved the expanse of space; Anne was just as interested in the people. The crowds that greeted them each night when they landed were “funny” and strange, like none she had ever known.16

  For the first time, Anne could see herself in a broad social context. Her education and upbringing had made her different from the women she met in the small towns—aware, curious, intellectual, and ambitious. She had little patience for uneducated women, she wrote home.17 Furthermore, she noted with a touch of self-consciousness, the average man, educated or not, was more interesting than any woman.

  But there was a type of woman who earned her complete admiration, embodied for the moment in Mrs. Bixby, the wife of the St. Louis banker who had backed Charles’s flight. Mrs. Bixby was educated, well-groomed, sensitive, and interesting. Whole and self-contained, she was still dedicated to home and family, content in her self-created world. She treated herself with grace and generosity—with the kind of energy one usually reserved for others. Anne was certain this was the key to happiness.18

  On July 6, the Lindberghs completed their flight, making a “perfect landing” at the Glendale Airfield outside Los Angeles. They were cheered by thousands and greeted by aviation and public officials; then they posed for photographers and motion picture cameras. Escorted to the TAT terminal, Lindbergh pressed a button that signaled sixteen passengers in New York’s Pennsylvania Station to board a train on the first leg of their westward journey. They were to disembark at Columbus, Ohio, where they would transfer to a plane for the flight over the Mississippi Valley to Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka they would board a Santa Fe coach for an overnight trip to Clovis, New Mexico. From there, at a pace thought miraculous, they would fly to Los Angeles
the next day, arriving within forty-eight hours of their departure. For the inaugural flight, Charles would pilot an eastbound flight to Waynoka, where he would turn around and pilot the westward flight back to Los Angeles. On the flight west, Amelia Earhart and Will Rogers were to be among his passengers.

  Anne was amazed at the luxuries of the commuter TAT flight. Unlike Charles’s plane, the fuselage was decorated like a Pullman car, with lush leather seats, window curtains, and lamps.19 The passengers were even served a mid-morning snack, and in addition to lunch, a proper tea. They were shuttled from plane to train by specially designed automobiles, and were given rest rooms to wash and change.20

  Anne, feeling self-conscious among the movie stars and celebrities who gathered for the inaugural, watched as Mary Pickford cracked a bottle of champagne over the nose of the plane. Anne was given an enormous bunch of yellow roses, but when the photographers were about to snap the picture, Miss Pickford took the roses, and Anne assumed the role of dutiful observer.

  The pressure of public life was beginning to take its toll. The strain of avoiding questions, quickly and politely, was like “fencing,” she wrote home. Although Charles managed quite easily, Anne became mired in the social amenities of the exchange. In desperation, she confided to her sister Con, she would foil them all by adopting a “Bright-Insane Smile.”21

  Even with the game mastered and the job done, Anne was lonely. Locked out of the airline meetings that Charles attended day and night, she felt useless and disconnected. This was Charles’s life, not hers; home and family were more substantive and real, even at a distance. Anne wondered whether the price she was paying for her marriage was too high. She was frightened by the realization of her dependency on Charles, his needs, and his unpredictable schedule. The letters from her family were like a protective shield she carried with her as she moved from place to place and meeting to meeting.