Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Determined not to let go of home, Anne tried to bring it with her. She memorized poetry at night so that she could amuse herself during the long hours of flying. She categorized the poems according to the emotions they evoked, regretting that few permitted her either joy or sorrow. To her, most of them were either pleasant or melancholy. Only Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beaumont, and Shakespeare could bring the pure distilled sounds that satisfied her. She consoled herself and her mother with letters, but they rippled with a sense of loss. Anne did take pleasure in seeing Charles happy, yet she felt uprooted, caught in a way of life that was not her own.

  She wrote to her sister Con on January 14, from Los Angeles, that the California rain was cold and penetrating, all the more painful because it was unexpected. Snuggled between a desk and a radiator, she wrote an ode to a New England spring, exploding with color, energy, and light. Imagining the beauty of Next Day Hill with its red fires burning and its gushing white blooms, Anne washed away the gray winter sky. The room itself became her garden, radiant with flowers everywhere.27

  While flying brought mastery to the level of art, Anne still let her fears overtake her. Unable to share them with Charles or with her family, Anne found a willing listener in Charles’s mother. When two TAT passenger planes crashed, killing everyone aboard, Anne, now in her third month of pregnancy, railed against the senseless loss of life. There had been no defects in the plane, and the weather report had been clear and favorable, yet sixteen lives had hung on the judgment of a single pilot. Would Charles be up to the task, she wondered in her letters to Evangeline? Would Charles know when to turn back? Perhaps they were deluding themselves; they might be the next to go down.

  She apologized to Evangeline for her frailty. Like Charles, she equated strength with reason, having learned her parents’ lessons well. Feelings sapped courage and resolve. Reason was at the crux of duty and virtue; everything else was self-indulgence. Determined not to succumb to her fears, Anne cultivated the manner of confidence, challenging herself to fly.

  By the end of January, with relentless coaching from Charles, Anne had mastered the Lockheed biplane and anxiously awaited the delivery of Charles’s new low-winged Speedster. Her real triumph was yet to come.

  Convinced that motorless flight—fast, cheap, and accessible—would be a spark for popular interest, Charles learned how to glide. With the help of Hawley Bowlus, a record-breaking pilot, Charles taught Anne, who delighted in the ease with which she learned and in the grace and beauty of the glider as it sailed. She wrote to her family that the plane was first towed across a field by a car; then, as the car went faster, it pulled the glider up into the air. When the rope was cut, the plane, like a kite, rode the air currents.

  After several practice runs, Charles encouraged Anne to take the glider pilot’s test. The day before her flight, he chose the ideal place—the Soledad Mountains, the highest peaks in San Diego. No one had ever sailed from them before, but Charles was convinced that the thermal lifts would raise Anne’s plane to a steady soar.

  Anne, less certain, climbed reluctantly to the peak of the mountain. But once she saw the glider “perched” at the edge of the cliff, Anne felt comfortable and confident. As the cameramen poised and the coach yelled commands, Anne was shot like an arrow off a bow, cutting the air and catching the wind.

  It was instinct that carried Anne off the cliff—instinct and Charles’s belief that she could do it. Wondering if she was about to be sacrificed to one of Charles’s grand ideals, Anne pretended it was a dream. But when she heard the keel scrape off the side of the mountain, her fears melted into serenity, and she felt in control. Gliding smoothly through the currents, she angled down the mountainside. Then she stopped with barely a warning “like a sled” into crusted snow.28

  It was only later, through the eyes of observers, that Anne understood what she had done. As she sailed down into the meadow beside the highway, cars stopped dead in their tracks; people rushed out to see what had fallen from the sky. “She’s all right!” yelled one woman. “This little girl fell all the way down the mountain, and she’s all right.”

  Dressed in white duck trousers, a sylph of a woman despite her pregnancy, Anne surmised that she must have looked positively insane.

  “But how will you get back up?” the woman asked, scaling the mountain with her eyes.

  “Oh, I’m not going up again,” Anne said. “This is where I meant to come.”29

  In fact, Anne had maneuvered her ship more than well. She had stayed aloft the required six minutes for a first-class license and became the first woman to qualify as a glider pilot. Her mother was in a frenzy, chastising her daredevil daughter for her dangerous acts. Young women across the country, though, responded by forming girls’ glider clubs, with Anne Lindbergh as a charter member.

  The success of her flight dissipated Anne’s ambivalence, and she began earnestly to study the mechanics of flight. The luxury of their new Falcon monoplane, with its isinglass windows and roomy cockpit, made her feel safe and comfortable. Charles had installed a generator to keep them warm, and they brought plenty of food and lined the cockpits with pillows and coats to prevent drafts. Best of all, the isinglass cover did not separate her from Charles. She shouted and poked at him playfully as they flew.

  To their adoring public, Anne and Charles were achieving a marital harmony in the air that few achieved in the comfort of home. The press, however, gave little credit to Anne for their success.

  The Literary Digest noted:

  When one recalls how few women are able to learn such a simple thing as driving an automobile from their husbands, with whom they are in other matters (with the possible exception of bridge) able to get along perfectly, one begins to suspect that as a teacher Lindbergh must have an unusual tact and patience.30

  In truth, Anne was a willing and able student who needed little more than Charles’s confidence to motivate and sustain her. In preparation for high-altitude flying, she was required to learn sextant navigation. Now the laws of physics that had eluded her as a student at Smith suddenly became crucial to her work as a navigator. With Charles’s help, Anne mastered the theory and mechanics of celestial navigation. Using a sextant to calculate the position of the sun, moon or stars, Anne triangulated their precise position.31

  She had forgotten the pleasure of focusing on one task and the joy of working with someone toward a common goal. Six months pregnant, she wrote to her mother that the difficult parts were the extremes of weather, boarding the plane, and climbing back out. But worst of all were her stiff limbs and body aches from sitting too long in a small seat.32

  Although she wished for nothing but home, Anne loved the wild beauty of California, with its cliffs plunging into the sea, and its rocky coast dotted with sandy white beaches.33

  Finally, on April 21, after a journey of four months, Anne and Charles set their course for home. Dressed, this time, in their electrically warmed flying suits and fur-lined jumpers and helmets, they flew their custom Lockheed Sirius high-altitude monoplane at 20,000 feet at a speed of 190 miles per hour. Choosing to break the time record rather than to fly low and slowly to conserve fuel, they stopped for gas in Wichita, Kansas. They made the trip from Glendale, California, to Roosevelt Field on Long Island in 14 hours, 45 minutes, and 32 seconds, nearly three hours under the record set the previous June. While Charles played down the value of their flight, the five thousand people who had waited all day and night at the airfield saw the Lindberghs as homecoming heroes.34

  When the plane came to a full stop, it was surrounded by the reporters and cameramen, as well as the scores of pilots, who had spent the night in the light-drenched field. Exhausted and nauseated, Anne was embarrassed to step out of the cockpit into the camera lights. But with genuine admiration, the photographers encircling her broke into applause.

  One year and thirty thousand miles later, the girl for whom flying had been “cold terror” was greeted by an adoring public and the approbation of her peers. Anne was
an equal among aviators and a pioneer of commercial flight. She smiled and waved at the cheering crowd.

  She was finally home.

  9

  Into the Cauldron

  Charles and Anne, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow in North Haven, Maine, en route to Asia, July 1931.

  (UPI/Corbis-Bettmann)

  THE LITTLE MERMAID1

  Into the smoky cauldron she must throw

  A mermaid’s kingdom, gleaming far below

  The restless waves and filtered light that falls

  Through dim pellucid depths on palace walls.

  All childhood haunts must go, all memories;

  Her swaying garden of anemones

  Circled by conch-shells, where the sea-fans dance

  To unheard music bending in a trance.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  MAY 1930, NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

  On Memorial Day 1930, Charles Lindbergh set a new record. He flew the 110 miles from Atlantic City to Newark in forty-five minutes.2 A mere puddle jump in the annals of aviation history, it was nonetheless noted nationwide. Sitting behind him in the cockpit was Dwight Morrow, suddenly the most interesting political figure in the country. Six months after his temporary appointment, Morrow was running in the primary race to retain his Senate seat. In less than an hour, without a word of testimony or endorsement, Lindbergh, his pilot-chauffeur, had clothed Morrow in his aura, teaching him the subtleties of media manipulation.

  As he swept down into Newark Metropolitan airport in the same Lockheed Sirius monoplane he and Anne had used on their record-breaking transcontinental flight a month earlier, Lindbergh sheathes Morrow, a symbol of old-fashioned values, in his silver flying machine. He gave Morrow the essence of his popularity—moral stability in a technological age. It was a generous gift to his ambitious father-in-law, one he might have given his own father had he lived to witness Lindbergh’s fame.

  They arrived to the din of fire engines, brass bands, and a huge cheering holiday crowd. As officials greeted them and reporters closed in, Lindbergh made certain he was in full view of the cameras, with Morrow by his side. Morrow, his usual disheveled self, was whisked into a waiting limousine and escorted by police on motorcycles to Krueger Hall, in downtown Newark. There, his head barely rising above the lectern, Morrow delivered an elegant speech on the pivotal issue of the campaign: Prohibition. Stunning his opponents and pleasing the Republican Party, Morrow made a persuasive argument for its repeal, stripping the law of its moral weight and presenting it as an unenforceable rule. He advocated the passage of the Volstead Act, which would grant each state the right to determine its policy toward the traffic of liquor. His challengers, two “dries,” Joseph F. Frelinghuysen, a former senator, and Representative Frank Fort, faded into the background as Morrow staged his “battle of words.”

  His opponents called him as idealistic but weak, out of touch with the electorate. The writer Edmund Wilson dubbed him a mechanical, unimpressive little man who promoted old-time religion—faith, confidence, and moral fiber—as an anodyne for complex social and economic problems. He was a puppet, Wilson said, “the gigantic ventriloquial voice … of American capitalism.”3 Apparently the electorate disagreed. Two weeks later, on June 17, Morrow made a landslide, winning the primary by three hundred thousand votes over his opponent, Representative Fort. An anonymous critic summed it up this way: “You might beat Morrow, but you could not beat Morrow and Will Rogers and Anne and Lindy combined.”

  Her father’s campaign made Anne nervous. Her pregnancy was constantly in the news. Not only was her husband thrown into the political turmoil; her unborn baby was, as well. Reporters stalked the gates outside Next Day Hill, querying the Lindberghs and Morrows as they passed and trying to bribe the servants for news. Anne was angry at the press. While she understood her responsibility as a public figure, she and Charles held firm to their decision to give out no information.4

  Heightening the tension was a mild heart attack suffered by Elisabeth. Later, it was revealed that she was dangerously ill; the Morrows had been informed by physicians that lesions were forming on the heart muscle and there was nothing they could do.5 Confined to bed, Elisabeth felt helpless, cheated of time and possibility. Nevertheless, she expected to open her Montessori school, as planned, in the first week of October. She and Connie had rented a small Victorian house in Englewood with a white fence around it, a big garden behind with apple trees, horse chestnuts, a mulberry tree, and a pig farm. She named it the Little School because the children were young. Her big dream, however, was coming true: they had enrolled forty children under the age of six.6

  With the Morrow and the Lindbergh families under one roof in Englewood, the days passed in a series of personal dramas and crises. Even though she was on “rest-cure,” Elisabeth invited her teaching staff to the house to swim, play tennis, and plan for the fall. Morrow continued at his mad pace, like a man running out of time. Charles, more or less grounded until the baby arrived, made himself busy with household chores, and Anne luxuriated in the simple pleasures of sleep, food, and long walks with their terrier. Now in her ninth month, she succumbed to a state of hazy consciousness, and longed for the slender, vital body she once had had, a body that yielded to her wishes. But as usual, nature was her consolation, reflecting and molding the contours of her mind, giving her faith in the cycle of the seasons. As she walked in the woods surrounding the Morrow home, she savored the sights and sounds of spring, stopping to admire the pure white dogwood. Later, in her poems reminiscent of Rilke, “No Angels” and “Dogwood,” the dogwood tree became a symbol of hope and new life.

  But new life, Anne sensed, had a hierarchy of its own, and some forms were more welcome than others. As she entered the last two weeks of pregnancy, she worried that the child might not be a boy, and confessed her fear in a letter to her mother-in-law. She arranged a code to elude the press. For a girl, the telegram would be “advising accepting terms of contract.” For a boy, it would be “advising purchasing property.” “Advise” and “accepting” each had an A, Anne explained to Evangeline, and the baby would be named Anne. There would be no question of a boy’s name—Charles. Besides the obvious alliteration, one can ponder her allusion to female acceptance and male control, to the ancient laws of kinship and property rights. But beyond the names was the fear itself, the inadequacy symbolized by not producing a male child.

  She wondered if Evangeline, for whom a male child had been salvation, would be disappointed and apologized in advance for falling short of expectation. Charles, she noted, seemed blasé about the baby’s sex, but Anne knew a boy would please him.7

  When Anne went into labor on Saturday, June 21, the Morrow estate became a fortress. Dr. Everett M. Hawks, associated with the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City, pushed his way through the crowds of reporters who stood at the Morrows’ gate. With him were four specialists and a nurse, Marie Cummings, who had resigned her position as head nurse of the Knickerbocker Hospital for the privilege of assisting at the Lindbergh birth. Present, as well, in addition to the immediate family, was Brigadier General J. J. Morrow, Dwight’s older brother. While the wires buzzed and reporters poised, the Morrow home grew still. Without real information, the reporters fabricated fanciful portraits of the expectant father nervously pacing the rooms of the mansion, seeking little company and comfort from others. It was probably not far from the truth. One imagines Charles solitary and withdrawn as he waited for news of the birth of his child.

  At 1:10 P.M. on Sunday, June 22, Anne gave birth to a baby boy, 7 pounds and 12.8 ounces. It was reported that Lindbergh ate his Sunday dinner and took a dive into the Morrows’ pool. The Daily News noted that it “seemed almost an omen, in view of the horoscope predicting the Eaglet will be a waterman rather than an airman.”8

  The euphoria, the unqualified joy of the moment, dissipated Anne’s antipathy toward the press. Reversing her pledge of silence, she sent a message to the reporters outside the gates, informing them that it was a do
uble birthday celebration—the day of her son’s birth was on her twenty-fourth birthday.

  As greetings from friends came pouring in, a steady stream of outsiders tried to gain admission to the Morrow home but were turned away by private guards. Within hours, the baby’s birth was front-page news across the nation and the world. The announcement of the Lindbergh birth in the New York Times elbowed aside Admiral Byrd’s return from Antarctica, even as he was taking time from his celebration schedule to congratulate Colonel Lindbergh in person. In France, the Lindbergh baby was honored as one of “our own,”9 and four thousand miles away, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “the infant son” was honored by the Kenosha Junior Optimist Club as a member in the highest standing.10

  Anne felt “gloriously happy” since her boy had been born. At first she had worried it would look like her, with brown hair and a big nose, but then she noticed that he had Charles’s mouth and chin. Relieved, she felt certain she had satisfied everyone.11

  Several days later, the Times reported that Anne had filed a birth certificate at the Englewood Department of Health without registering the baby’s name. As if the baby’s birth had eclipsed her own and obliterated her connection with her past, Anne gave her occupation as “flyer” and her city of permanent residence as St. Louis, Missouri.12

  In the wake of Morrow’s victory and the baby’s birth, the Lindberghs began to withdraw from the press. Anne and Charles appeared and disappeared at will, and the press soon felt manipulated. Under the guise of public interest, they wanted the news. It wasn’t Lindbergh’s flaws that irked them; it was his persona of perfection. In an article entitled “What’s Wrong with Lindbergh?” John S. Gregory of Outlook magazine warned that if Lindbergh persisted in being perfect and “Godlike,” the press, out of sheer boredom, would be forced to fabricate his baser qualities.13