Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  But away from the formalities of public life, driving alone through the pastures and farmlands of the California countryside, they were enveloped in their own private world. There was a “golden bloom” over everything. “Maybe it’s just the way we feel, C. and I, when we get off together, alone—all gold”22

  They flew over places never before seen from the air, inaccessible to archaeologists without months of travel on horseback or by foot. Their jaunt across the Yucatán peninsula more than a year earlier had earned them a high reputation as aerial photographers. Now, on their flight back from the West Coast, Anne and Charles photographed Native American ruins that predated Coronado in the painted deserts of New Mexico.

  For Anne, the highlight of the return trip was their stopovers in Cleveland and in Detroit to see their families. The visit to Grandma Cutter in Cleveland was like returning home, and the one in Detroit permitted her to see a new aspect of Charles. He was playful and spoiled among his family, and she joined in the game, treating him like a pampered child. The contrast made her own childhood seem long ago, stolen prematurely and without warning.

  During a detour to Englewood, Anne confronted the razing of the house on Palisade Avenue, the home in which she had spent her childhood. The emptiness was terrifying, as though someone close to her had died. Her childhood, so rich with feelings and memories, had simply “vanished.”23

  The shock of that loss Anne carried with her, even as she and Charles headed south to Washington, D.C., and to President Hoover’s mountain retreat in Virginia. Amid the ceremonial necessities of a visit with the president, Anne saw only the poignancy of ordinary life. Reality, she wrote home, belonged not to the president or to celebrated fliers, but to the illiterate, impoverished, Bible-loving mountaineers, in tune with one another and with the beauty of the land. Their knowledge was clear, deep, and ineffable, untainted by pretense or convention.24

  To Betty, Anne exuded a new confidence—bright, lovely and radiant.25 Flying, it seemed, suited her well. She had already passed her physical exam, and was preparing for her student pilot’s license.

  In fact, Charles was tutoring Anne daily at the Aviation Club on Long Island. Each morning they made the long trek from Englewood to Hicksville, where they arrived at eight-thirty to make practice runs. In a dual control plane, with Charles behind her, Anne would take off, circle several hundred feet above the field, and land. After each landing, with Anne still at the controls, Charles would discuss her flight. At times Anne’s lessons were cut short because reporters in planes flew dangerously close, hanging out the windows to take her photograph.26

  On August 24, having given her nine hours of instruction, Charles judged Anne ready for a solo flight. After several runs and a few words of caution, he sent her off alone. Anne climbed into the cockpit and took off across the field, gaining speed rapidly. As the plane rose, she pulled back the throttle, circling until she gained an altitude of five hundred feet, and then landed. She tried this again; on the third round, she stayed aloft longer, circling several minutes above the field. Obviously pleased, Charles sat on the porch of the clubhouse and read the newspaper, glancing, every few seconds, at the sky.27 When they arrived in Englewood, Charles was flushed with pride for Anne.28

  Charles was pleased. Anne was coming along well, in spite of her fears and fits of homesickness. And she was as quick and as sharp as he had hoped. Eager to please him and to earn his approval, she was a sturdy and disciplined crewman. But she touched him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Charles had been lonelier than he knew.29 Now, Anne’s presence in the back cockpit, within the touch of his hand and the call of his voice, filled the long, empty hours of flying. With training and experience, Anne would be able to co-pilot Charles’s plane, and he was becoming more ambitious. He planned to extend his mail route and survey tours, and to make the long-delayed flight to Asia.

  For the moment, Charles was content to remain on Long Island. Even though the Morrow family had gone to their end-of-summer retreat in Maine, Charles stayed an extra week to watch the air races in Westhampton.30 Relaxed and satisfied, Charles made a sudden truce with reporters, permitting them to take photographs and conduct interviews. Anne, meanwhile, was bursting with impatience to see her family. She missed her parents and her sisters. “I dream of North Haven every night,” Anne wrote to her mother.31

  8

  The Odyssey

  Anne and Charles, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, 1929.

  (Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

  And this should give you pause my son; don’t stay too long away from home, leaving your treasures there and brazen suitors near. They’ll squander all you have and take it from you, and then how will your journey serve?

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1929, NORTH HAVEN, MAINE

  At last, Anne and Charles arrived!

  Elisabeth shouted wildly to her mother as she watched their red sports plane1 swoop down at sunset onto the meadow behind the house. Thrilled to see Anne safe on the ground, Betty rushed out the back door waving her arms in circles of joy.

  Having been called on a search mission for a TAT airliner lost in the mesas of Arizona and New Mexico, they had arrived three weeks later than expected. It was not surprising, considering their eagerness to return home, that the Lindberghs set a new speed record on their flight from St. Louis: 905 miles in five hours and twenty-one minutes. Elisabeth remarked that Anne looked very tired, as though the trip had frayed her nerves.

  But Anne was pleased to be “home” again. Even this remote eighty-four-acre estate on the northwest coast of a tiny island in Penobscot Bay was warm and inviting after four months of nomadic life. Set on a windswept point, surrounded by meadows and lawns, the house was a rambling New England farmstead with a touch of Colonial style. While it lacked the majesty of the Lamonts’ Sky Farm, it rivaled the neighboring summer estates inhabited since the turn of the century by Boston bankers and Wall Street financiers. Betty had commissioned Delano and Aldrich to build the house in 1928, at the same time she had authorized Next Day Hill, and she designed a separate cottage for her children, hoping to give them privacy and space.2 Now, after many weeks of waiting, Anne and Charles were finally there.

  They had missed the social highpoint of the summer: the Pulpit Harbor sailboat race, capped by a party on the Lamonts’ back lawn. And there was already a chill in the evening air and a tinge of crimson on the ridge of maples. But the days were still warm enough to sail and picnic, and to walk along the cliffs and wildflower meadows of the outlying islands. The next day Betty packed lunch, and they sailed southwest through the jagged maze of inlets and harbors to the White Islands. As Charles, Betty, and Dwight lingered behind, Anne and Con, in blue jeans and red scarves, leaped across the rocks with childlike abandon.3

  Three months apart had been painful to all of them; they were so pleased to be together again. But Dwight had serious matters on his mind. Since Anne’s marriage to Charles and the constant risk she took in flying, Dwight feared her premature death. He wanted to bequeath Anne some money, but he worried that it would pass out of the Morrow family if Anne and Charles were to die at the same time. Dwight talked to Anne and Charles about his making such a will, but Dwight and Charles disagreed about the terms. Finally, however, Dwight decided to leave $1 million in trust to Anne, money that would revert to the Morrow family on her death.4

  Because of the thick fog blanketing North Haven, Betty, Dwight, Anne, and Charles delayed their flight to Englewood. Elisabeth, however, left by boat for Boston. She wrote to Connie that a strange happiness had enveloped her those last few days. She felt certain she would never get married and vowed to find happiness by establishing her school.5

  She then set about surveying the grammar schools of Massachusetts, sending a running narrative to Connie as she did so. Anne and Charles, back in Englewood, prepared for a three-week air mail and survey tour. It was to be a 7000-mile flight, the longest since Charl
es’s 1928 good-will tour. Meticulously planned, minute by minute, the flight would circle the Caribbean through the islands to the northern coast of South America and back through Central America to Cuba and Florida. The goal was to survey existing Pan Am routes from Miami to Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, and to study the possibility of passenger travel across the Canal Zone.6 Flying in a German-owned, state-of-the-art, Sikorsky twin-engine amphibian plane, the Lindberghs were to be accompanied by Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American Airlines, and his wife, Betty.7

  At dawn on September 18, Anne and Charles set off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, accompanied by a co-pilot and a radio operator, to meet the Trippes in Washington.8 Unlike their previous survey flights alone in their private monoplane, this was a public relations event designed to convince sixteen governments, along with the American people, of the viability of commercial flight. An arduous, back-breaking tour, it was brilliantly staged by Trippe to have the look and feel of an upper-class excursion—socialites embarking on a leisurely cruise. Charles wore a gray business suit, his helmet discreetly held in his hand, and Anne wore a pastel chiffon dress and a brimmed straw hat. Trippe, who didn’t particularly like to fly, followed Lindbergh like his “shadow” in a white Panama suit and brown-and-white saddle shoes. Only his wife exuded ease, joking with reporters and charming the officials.9

  They rose each morning at four and were in the air by seven. When they stopped every few hours to refuel and to deliver and pick up mail, they were met by cheering, flag-waving crowds. And when they weren’t at receptions, dinners, or parties, Anne sat on the plane in a comfortable lounge chair, writing in her diary and reading books.10 She may have appeared absurd to those around her, like a misplaced matron on her suburban front porch; in fact, she was examining the metaphysics of spatial and human relationships during flight. She concluded that distance was mental, not physical. The sound and touch of people back home were as vital as the quality of one’s imagination.11

  They toured the Caribbean islands, stopping in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. In lyrical images, Anne describes the magnificent beauty of the land and sea, never before viewed from the sky—the “rich green” land, the “iridescent” seas,12 and the majestic cliffs “plunging” into “turquoise” waters.13

  But as they flew across the constellation of islands, Anne worried that she and Charles were the harbingers of change that might destroy both the culture and the land. Progress, Anne realized, could be an illusion. She deplored the arrogance that led to the exploitation of people and land.14 She marveled at Charles’s prediction that the islands would be only a day’s journey from the U.S. coastline, and wondered whether this access would breed the commercialism she had seen in Nassau.

  As news of their flights rippled through the foreign press, the size of the crowds swelled to thousands. Symbols of “progress,” they were embraced—sometimes too heartily. When they arrived at the final mail-route stop in Paramaribo on September 23, government officials were determined to parade them through the streets, like icons of American technology, in a car hung with red, white, and blue lanterns. Charles declined, but was compelled by sheer courtesy to ride behind the official limousine in an unmarked car. The torches were lit, the band played “Lucky Lindy,” and people ran and shouted alongside their car. “Charles,” wrote Anne, “gritted his teeth and didn’t look to left or right—that look of contained bitterness … a wild mad dream.”15

  On October 10, on the way back to Florida through Central America, they made an unannounced detour from Belize across unexplored territory between Yucatán and the British Honduras. Unlike their jaunt the year before, this time they were accompanied by the Carnegie Institute archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder and by a coterie of reporters more interested in the drama inside the plane than in the Mayan ruins they had come to document. They reported that, even at ten thousand feet, Anne was the ideal hostess, serving a two-course meal during the flight, tidying up the cabin after the men, and intermittently acting as Charles’s navigator and photographer. The reporters were awed as much by her precision as by her grace.16

  While Anne and Charles were living like vagabond performers in a circus, the Morrows were trapped by illness and circumstance. Dwight Jr. had been sent home from Amherst College, depressed, confused, and on the edge of a breakdown. Once again, Betty and Dwight struggled with their feelings as they prepared to send him to a sanitarium, this time in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His physician, Dr. Austen Riggs,17 said he was much improved; he could not, however, assure them that their son’s sweeping moods of depression and elation would not return.

  As usual, Dwight tried to convince his son that health was an act of will. For the first time Betty wondered whether her son was overwhelmed by his father’s expectations, but her Puritan ethic prevailed. She decided he needed to stand straight and tall, meeting the challenge on its own terms. Only then could his ambitions be fulfilled. Resolved to help him, Betty hired a professional tutor.18

  Once Dwight Jr. was settled in Stockbridge, the Morrows prepared to return to Mexico. Anne and Charles were flying at record speed up the coast and around the gulf at the same time that the Morrows lumbered by Pullman train through the Midwest on their week-long journey south. They were welcomed in Mexico City by huge crowds, but nothing was quite the same. Mexico was no longer at the center of their lives. Betty missed Englewood and Anne, Dwight had his mind on New Jersey politics, and Elisabeth, now living in Mexico and ill with heart disease, was homesick even in the presence of her parents.19

  Anne, too, was lonely, and missing home, which had now assumed a new definition. It was not a place so much as an ideal, clothed in family relationships. When the Morrows were together, they were “home.” Formerly, they had moved as if in concentric circles, but Anne was about to find a new orbit on the outer rim. After nearly a week in Englewood Anne wrote to her mother in Mexico that she was expecting a baby. The news sent Betty Morrow into fits of anxiety.

  Betty was consumed with thoughts of Anne, no matter where she went or what she did. Even a game of golf with Elisabeth couldn’t distract her. It was as if she could hear Anne’s loneliness through her words, and Betty longed to hold and comfort her as she had done in the days before her wedding.20

  When Anne and Charles had arrived in Englewood during the last week of October, the house was empty. Anne reveled in the comfort and familiarity; she rearranged the furniture in her room and rummaged through the closets and attics to find objects from her childhood. The thought of a baby of her own stirred the wish to hold on to the past, even though she couldn’t remember having been happier than in the present. Released for the moment from Charles’s schedule, for the first time since her marriage, Anne had time for herself. When Charles went off to Panama on business for Pan Am, Anne wrote sonnets,21 read Chekhov and Tolstoy, and visited childhood friends.

  The press had no inkling of Anne’s pregnancy. Experienced in the art of survival, the Morrows had learned to keep their secrets. There was, though, one secret they could not keep—Dwight Morrow’s political career had taken a new turn. Anne’s marriage to Charles made Dwight the perfect candidate for just about everything. He was appointed to a five-power conference on naval limitation in London at the same time as he was offered the New Jersey Republican Senate seat occupied by Walter E. Edge, who had just been appointed Ambassador to France.22 While it was clear to Morrow he was playing in the big leagues, it was also clear that he had to follow the rules.

  Morrow was recognized as a shrewd negotiator and gifted diplomat; now his image was enhanced by the Lindbergh name. The mere sound of it was like an elixir to an electorate still mourning the loss of thousands of men in the war fought little more than a decade earlier. With his son-in-law at his side, Morrow could woo voters from a platform beyond party affiliation: “Peace through progress.”

  Although Dwight was flattered, he had a measure of contempt for political machinations, and Betty noted that he felt “forced” and “tricked” at
having to make a fast decision at a long distance. He did not know that his friend Joseph Frelinghuysen was also a candidate for Ambassador Edge’s seat.23 Betty, aware of her husband’s indecision, recruited her friends George Rublee and Reuben Clark, at the embassy, to encourage Dwight to accept the Senate post. And when he did, she was overjoyed. This was the life she had hoped for. The appointment was surely just the beginning; there were already rumbles of a presidential draft for 1936.24

  As Betty packed their bags to leave Cuernavaca, she was suddenly overwhelmed by Mexico’s beauty—its white mountains against an azure sky, the pristine water, the sun-soaked countryside. Nothing, though, could compare with the thought of being home in Englewood with Anne.25

  But to Betty’s disappointment, Anne did not plan to stay. Pregnant or not, she was expected to fly. Charles had commitments he wanted to keep and still harbored hopes of an Asian flight. Anne, on the other hand, wanted to find a home, a farmhouse in Connecticut or on Long Island. She would live anywhere, she wrote to her mother, just to feel self-sufficient.26

  Once again, Christmas overtook the Morrows. The decoration of the tree, the poinsettias in the halls, the fires burning from room to room, embraced them in a familiar island of consolation. For the Morrows, Christmas held the promise of salvation, illuminating and sanctifying their daily lives. But Christmas at home was a luxury that Anne did not dare to savor. Nauseated in her early pregnancy, Anne reluctantly planned her flights with Charles. They would bring in the New Year with an inspection tour of the TAT lines, and, after flying to Columbus and Indianapolis, would arrive in St. Louis on New Year’s Eve.