Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Ironically, the press did not understand the power of its fabrications. The media image of Lindbergh was molding the family’s psychological reality. The Lindberghs and Morrows began to see one another as idealized personalities; Anne, who sensed the distortion, believed it beyond her control. Dwight Jr. felt the curse of his “presidential” father and his “godlike” brother-in-law, and Elisabeth also struggled with Anne’s portrait of perfection. Since Anne’s marriage and the birth of the baby, the tables had turned. In Elisabeth’s eyes, Anne was the one who had everything. It was her own life that seemed uncertain.

  In the days succeeding the birth of Charles Jr., Elisabeth, recuperating in Maine, wrote a letter begging Anne for her understanding and sympathy. Anne was ruffled by her sister’s jealousy; her self-doubt evoked Anne’s guilt. Nonetheless, Anne responded elegantly, portraying the birth of her son as just another milestone Elisabeth could easily match.14

  Deferring to Elisabeth as an authority on childrearing, Anne sought her advice in the care of her son. She thought the Montessori method “enlightening” and played with the idea of Watsonian motherhood. John B. Watson, an American psychologist, preached a detached and scientific stance, encouraging mothers to be physically and emotionally removed, scientific and objective, without selfish or neurotic motives.15 Anne joked that she easily fit the ideal. She had no desire to cuddle her baby.16

  Throughout the fall, Charles became increasingly restless. He wanted to return to his flying schedule, and he wanted Anne to fly with him. Her rebounding health signaled to him that she was ready. Reluctantly, Anne agreed to hire a nurse to care for the baby while she and Charles traveled. But Marie Cummings, the nurse who had attended the baby’s birth and had promised to stay, now gave word of her wish to leave. She was a hospital nurse used to big-city tumult, and was tired of the crowded house, small-town life, and unpredictable schedule. Elisabeth’s personal maid, Mary Beatties, told a friend, Betty Gow, of an opening on the Lindbergh-Morrow staff and suggested that she ask for an interview.

  Betty Gow, dark-eyed and graceful, with a delicate beauty much like Anne’s, was a salesgirl who had quit school at the age of fourteen. She had come from Glasgow, Scotland, in May 1929 to earn her living as a domestic servant. Since her arrival, she had held five jobs, three of them in Detroit, where she had visited her boyfriend in the hope that he would marry her. When the relationship ended in a quarrel in September 1930, Betty returned to New Jersey as a nursemaid for a local family. On February 23, 1931, Betty Gow was interviewed by Betty Morrow’s secretary, Kathleen Sullivan, and sent up the hill to the Morrow estate. Banks, the butler, who also served as Dwight Morrow’s valet, met her at the door and ushered her upstairs to Anne and Charles, who greeted her on the second-floor landing. The interview, a half-hour in length, was conducted as they stood in the hallway.

  To Betty Gow, Charles seemed “nobody special”—not at all like the image drawn by the press. She was struck by his lack of sophistication when he complimented Betty on her English and then, realizing it was her native tongue, turned red with embarrassment. But Betty liked Anne right away.17 Unpretentious, without makeup and fancy clothes, Anne seemed accessible, familiar, and as naïve as Betty herself.

  Betty saw herself as a novice servant, untutored in the ways of the educated and rich. In spite of her short stints as nursemaid, she had little knowledge of child care and was, in fact, surprised that the Lindberghs trusted her. When they called the very next morning to engage her services, she was thrilled. Later, Betty came to believe that her naïveté had been her biggest asset. She was gentle and earnest and willing to learn, and the Lindberghs must have sensed that they could train her to fill their idiosyncratic needs. In many ways, it was a perfect match. Not knowing what to expect, Betty expected nothing, and not knowing what to give, the Lindberghs gave nothing. With little time off on a daily or even weekly basis, Betty simply made do, freeing the Lindberghs to follow their peripatetic schedule.

  For one week, Marie Cummings tutored Betty in Watsonian precepts. The baby’s schedule, unlike his parents’, was regular and strict. He ate at the same hours every day, and to prevent him from waking at night, he was roused at ten P.M., had his “nappy” changed, and was put on the toilet. He was so annoyed by this that he went back to sleep and did not wake up until morning. Betty Gow and the baby, nicknamed Charlie, moved to the third floor and into Dwight Jr.’s childhood quarters. Now that they were parents, Anne and Charles were more uncomfortable than ever with the crowded house and their dependence on the Morrows. If they disagreed on how much time Anne should spend with their child, they passionately agreed on the need to find a home of their own.

  During his flying tours over Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, Charles surveyed tracts of land. He had found a parcel of 382 acres near Princeton, in the town of Hopewell,18 and returned with Anne by car so that she could see it. Only an hour and five minutes by train from New York, with its sprawling university, its small English Tudor village, and its lush farmland, Princeton seemed to marry the East and Midwest, and wrap up all the best in storybook fashion with a New England white picket fence. The land, nineteen minutes from Princeton, had a brook and fields and woodlands filled with beautiful oaks. Until they could build a house, they would live in a rented cottage near town, with a field sufficient for a landing strip.19

  Their rented farmhouse, along with the promise of a home of their own, assuaged Anne’s fears of leaving the baby. The Colonial farmhouse had two stories, two bedrooms, and servants’ quarters, and was on a quiet back road surrounded by big trees. Anne hired a newly arrived English couple, the Whateleys, to run the house and garden, and within a month she prepared Betty Gow and the baby to make the move. Enthralled with the newness of it all, Anne relished setting up the house, buying sheets and towels, kitchenware, and inexpensive furniture.

  The early months in Princeton were a happy time for Anne. She adored the baby and missed him terribly when she had to leave with Charles. If she was not home by his bedtime, she consoled herself with visions of his scrunched-up, squinty smile. On the days she was home, she played with the baby, cranking up the gramophone and singing and dancing to the music throughout the day.

  Hoping to pass some of her joy to her mother, Anne wrote long letters to her. She lived only two hours from Englewood, but the letters were Anne’s way of capturing the beauty and texture of her motherhood. It was a gift her mother deserved. The letters had a new quality—mellow, peaceful, and observant—as though she had earned her legitimate place. Free of self-justification, they were alive with images of small-town life—football games, gardens, and hands smelling of leaves, her pleasure in reading Katherine Mansfield by the fire, and her hours of contemplative solitude. Most of all, she wrote of her “lamb,” sleeping in the barn, shielded by windowed doors that flooded it with light and kept out the wind. He had become so responsive to her and Charles, longing for their hugs and delighting in their games. Most of all, he loved when Charles swung him through the air, as if he were flying in his father’s plane.20

  Charles, too, was thriving, supervising the building of their new house and chopping down trees for firewood, as he had done with his father on the banks of the Mississippi. The foundation of the house, reported to be sixty by forty feet, was nearing completion, and the long road to the highway was finally done. When Charles wasn’t at home, he was at work at the Rockefeller Institute with Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize–winning surgeon and biologist. Elisabeth’s health was deteriorating, and Charles, encouraged by Anne, hoped he could apply his mechanical skills to designing laboratory apparatus that would help Carrel repair damaged heart valves.

  She sensed that her precious time at home was running out. For the moment, Charles was content with his work, but she knew she could not remain home for long. Charles expected her, at the very least, to attend public receptions and ceremonies. She wrote to Evangeline that it was as if she “jumped from bed into a plane;” the double life of wife and mothe
r was a tightrope of loyalties and responsibilities.21 Already sensing future conflicts between her and Charles, Anne tried to rally her family behind her. But Elisabeth was ill and preoccupied with her school; their mother, now the grand dame of New Jersey, was more consumed by public events than before; and Con was still a schoolgirl at Milton Academy. Anne’s best hope for friendship lay with Evangeline, whom she tried to lure into her fold. It was as if she were making a deal: in exchange for her friendship and support, she would give Evangeline a backstage view of her son’s life. Instinctively, Anne played on Evangeline’s sympathy, pulling her close with news of the baby and connecting the baby to Charles in every way.

  But her efforts ran like water through a sieve. Evangeline would come to visit, but she did not stay; she seemed incapable of the intimacy Anne required. Charles, too, had an ambivalent streak, which Anne and Betty Gow found strange and troubling; he sometimes pushed the baby away. Anne wrote to Evangeline that Charles held his hands out “for your lamb” and then squeezed him around the neck. Betty noticed that, under the guise of promoting independence, Charles locked the baby out of the house without any toys and forbade others to answer his cries. She also thought it cruel of Charles to shave Skean, the Scottish terrier, a periodic procedure that made the dog antisocial and skittish. The dog had taken to hiding under chairs when people were around.

  But if these strange occurrences were unsettling, they paled beneath the real threat. The baby was the object of so much public interest that Anne’s anxiety about his safety was becoming ever more intense. News of their land purchase had leaked to the press. The exact location, the amount of acreage, along with the dimensions of the house, were printed in newspapers around the country. Reporters had even tracked them to their rented farmhouse. And the more the public learned, the more insatiable it grew. Strangers would call them at home in Princeton and demand to see the baby. One woman said “she must see that baby—life or death.”22 In Little Falls, Minnesota, Charles’s hometown, souvenir collectors had ransacked his childhood house, leaving little standing other than its shell.23

  Worst of all, sightseers had broken through the guarded gates in Englewood and had killed Elisabeth’s dog, Daffin, with their car. They left the dog howling without even bothering to stop.24

  By the beginning of April 1931, Anne’s domestic routine was all but forgotten. Charles was planning a trip to California and was talking about a long summer flight to the Orient. Without her family to take care of the baby in Princeton, Anne asked Whateley to bring Charlie to Englewood. At least Aunt Annie, her mother’s sister, would come to see him, she wrote to her mother. She and Charles would stay for Easter and leave the following week.

  But Charles must have sensed Anne’s anxiety, for he canceled the trip. Anne was so relieved, she could do nothing but rave about the baby—his curly golden hair, his beautiful smile, his tanned face, which flushed with excitement in the warmth of the spring sunshine, and his growing discernment of people. He was beginning to be afraid of strangers, and kept a steady grip on Anne or Betty Gow.25

  Meanwhile, Elisabeth made an astonishing announcement. She would marry in June—June 6, to be exact. She had met a man, she revealed, on the beach in Nassau that May while her parents were in Europe and Con, Dwight Jr., and Connie had left for home. She was sitting alone when he introduced himself, and they had spent that day and many days afterward strolling along the beach and talking. At week’s end, Elisabeth was certain—they were both certain—that each had found the person divinely ordained as spouses.26

  His name was Clyde Roddy; he was a thirty-three-year-old Presbyterian minister from Arlington, New Jersey, recently widowed. Attractive, athletic, smart, and well-educated, Roddy was a graduate of Yale, the Union Theological Seminary, and Southern Methodist University.27 To Anne, he seemed a little too ardent in his attentions to Elisabeth and premature in his expectations of marriage. With help from Con, Anne tried to dissuade Elisabeth, but Elisabeth refused to listen. Ecstatic at the possibility of marriage, she was not ashamed by the clandestine manner and brevity of her romance.

  Two weeks later, on May 6, Dwight and Betty Morrow returned from Europe. Shocked at Elisabeth’s news, they were convinced that no man of honor would have acted with such impropriety, proposing to a woman in her parents’ absence and not asking them for her hand in marriage. They implored Elisabeth to reconsider, but their daughter was adamant. The power of Clyde’s love filled her with a divine radiance, the light of God. She knew her mother had expected her to marry a different kind of man,28 someone like a J. P. Morgan partner or a diplomat. But she could not see a life of pouring tea for dignitaries in the stuffy salons of Europe. No—Clyde was neither brilliant nor rich, but the money he had he spent on the laborers in his parish who needed help.29

  Elisabeth’s engagement was a brash rebellion against everything for which her parents stood. Yet once again it was clothed in high nobility—church, God, service to man. Finally she was free of her parents’ upper-class pretensions, their moneyed life style and social demands. And finally she was free of her love for Connie and Connie’s desire to possess her. Marriage to a minister would resolve the problem of her sexuality. It was physical love, perfunctory and procreative, without the weight of carnal sin. Marriage to Clyde, in effect, offered her autonomy in the midst of constraint. But Elisabeth’s plan for subterfuge failed. Betty and Dwight forbade her to marry a bridegroom who acted too eager for a minister of God. Elisabeth reluctantly bowed to her parents’ wishes, breaking her engagement to Clyde.

  While Elisabeth had been determined to please no one, Anne dedicated herself to Charles. As Anne had feared the short holiday trip Charles planned had mushroomed into a three-month jaunt across Canada, northwest to Alaska, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. In preparation, Charles was starting her on a rough training course at the Aviation Country Club on Long Island. By mid-May, she was spending so many hours flying that she had little time to be with her baby. Charles was a taskmaster with a critical streak, always expecting Anne to do her best. He worked her daily, into the night, and when she was not up to standard, he treated her like a wayward child. Nonetheless, she was moving along; soon she would have ten hours of solo flight and she could apply for her pilot’s license.30

  Without intent, Anne had capitulated to Charles. She renounced her desire to stay at home and committed herself to preparing for the flight. On May 30, as Charles beamed with approval, Anne made four landings, spiraled from an elevation of two thousand feet, executed figure-eights, and performed all the requirements for becoming licensed.31

  But for Anne, the victory was bittersweet. Now that she was a pilot, Charles planned to equip their monoplane with dual controls so that she could relieve him on long flights. Charles’s ambition seemed to have no geographical or cultural bounds; he planned a trip of mythological proportions. They would fly seventy-one hundred miles through what the newspapers were to call “the wildest and least inhabited portions of the globe,” attempting to carve an aerial passage northwest to the Orient. It was a feat that had taken explorers four centuries to achieve by boat.32

  Their monoplane, the Sirius, equipped with its 600–horsepower Cyclone engine and new pontoons, would have gasoline tanks capable of holding enough fuel for two thousand miles, thus giving them the potential to navigate the inland rivers and lakes of North America and the Bering Sea.33 Charles’s goal was simple, Anne later wrote: to link the continents by air and to find the shortest surface route from New York to Tokyo, pointing a straight line through Canada along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to Asia. While the strategic and commercial value of such an air route was indisputable, Anne later noted that their motives were entwined with the “glamour and magic” of the Orient and the realization that they would see inaccessible, unexplored territory.34

  Reflecting the adulation of the American press, the Japanese expressed their pleasure at the prospect of welcoming the Lindberghs. Captain Kodama, chief of the technical section of the Japanese
Air Bureau, said, “Japan will be delighted to welcome Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh, whose names, features, and exploits are as familiar here as in the United States … The visit to the Far East by air of the first American to conquer the Atlantic is a matter of great interest to us all.”

  The Soviet Union, the Philippines, and Denmark followed suit, granting the Lindberghs the right to land and to refuel.

  During the month of June, Anne practiced Morse code on a buzzer in the comfort of her bedroom in Princeton. As an aid, she identified the foreign sounds and symbols with familiar images from myths and fairy tales, and she passed her third-class radio operator’s test along with Charles—though with a lower grade. By month’s end, she and Charles had increased their speed to seventeen words a minute. They planned to have two radio sets on the plane, one of them the conventional type and the other an emergency device.35

  On June 22, 1931, Anne and Charlie held a quiet birthday party for Charlie. The immediate family and the servants gathered in the front courtyard of the house in Englewood and, in loving unison, sang “Happy Birthday.” Anne lit one candle in the cake on a small wooden table; Charles took photographs. The curly-haired baby had grown chubby, with a large head and short torso. While Anne could see him only as a reflection of Charles, others saw a resemblance to her father.36 Neither the press nor the staff was reminded that it was Anne’s birthday too, but in the evening, the Morrows and the Lindberghs celebrated in town.

  As preparations for the trip expanded, so did Anne’s fears. Her mother, sensing Anne’s sadness, offered to keep the baby with her at their home in North Haven. Anne was grateful that the baby would be with her mother. It quelled her anxiety about leaving home. She knew he would be protected and loved.37