Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Caught again in the web of her mother’s life, Anne felt like an adolescent struggling to define her values. As though her Calvinist grandfather were thundering at her, she attempted to justify the blasphemy of a writer’s life. Writing implied a narcissistic life with no concern for public service. Was her parents’ ethic of charitable works the only criterion for a virtuous life? Was giving public service the only gift worth making? Paralyzed by guilt, Anne was still unable to write the narrative of the Asian trip. It was as though her writing and their flight had been acts of hubris that called down on them the death of Charlie. Though she believed her inability to write was a lack of connection between the book and her life, it is possible, as some professionals say, that the obstacle was her unexplored rage. It was the nexus between her feelings and her work that crippled the writing process. She would sit for hours on end, unable to find words that expressed her thoughts.47

  With a generosity and sensitivity for which Anne would always be grateful, Charles understood that writing was Anne’s lifeline. Aided by his encouragement, she tried to form her notes and letters into a narrative, but her letters and diaries, written in snippets in hotel rooms and the back cockpit of the plane, were of little help. They were devoid of emotion; they were the empty notations of a dutiful observer who wanted only to return home to Charlie.

  As she moved toward her twenty-sixth birthday, she reassessed her life.48 She resolved to capture eternal moments before they were stolen. Her diary flowered with detailed descriptions of everyday life. Every movement of Charles, every gathering of family and friends, resonated with meaning.

  She found a kindred soul in the British novelist Charles L. Morgan.49 Her sense of the eternal was heightened when she read his novel The Fountain. “This is it,” she wrote in her diary. “This is what I want—here. This man knows!”50

  “Death is the answer,” Morgan had written: “When someone takes death inside himself, he relinquishes feelings of relative importance to others … He is suffused with humility and born again. He is the true saint and philosopher.”51 Man, is a creature divided against himself. “His desires cry in his silences.” The solution is to withdraw within the circles of consciousness toward the center of one’s being. Only at the core can one find the union of imagination and immortality.

  Finding in Morgan’s book a metaphor that would permeate her writing, she copied the lines into her diary: “[One must seek] the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”52 The axis of the wheel “moves forward but it never revolves. It is the core of sanity in the heart of madness.”53

  Unaware that the process had begun, and terrified by the possibility, Anne gradually began to move apart from those around her. She knew that her awareness made her different from those immersed in the world of action. She knew she had to find another way of life, a means by which she could redefine her values and stand alone. But self-confirmation implied a separation from Charles and her mother, a loneliness she could not bear. Abandoned by her Presbyterian notions of God, she reached through Charles Morgan beyond Christianity toward a theology that challenged the duality of good and evil and the boundaries between life and death.

  On June 22, 1933, Anne celebrated her birthday with thoughts of Charlie. He would have been two years old. Family and friends gathered in the garden of the Morrow estate for supper. As she watched Aunt Alice’s home movies of Charlie, Anne realized that he could live only in her mind. But more and more, her dreams were filled with visions of the new baby. Strange—it always looked like Charlie.54

  While Anne was contemplating the birth of her new child, Congress was preparing the law that would transfer the crime of kidnapping from state to federal jurisdiction. The act, known as the Lindbergh Law, stipulated that unless the victim was returned within a week, it would be presumed that he or she had been carried across state lines. The maximum penalty was life imprisonment. (A year later, the law was amended to make kidnapping an offense punishable by death.) Before the enactment of the law, kidnapping had been a misdemeanor punishable by a sentence of five years to life.55

  Once Charlie’s birthday passed, a cloud seemed to lift, and Anne’s quest for strength and answers became more determined. She took daily pleasure in the plans for the new wing they would add to the Morrow home for her and Charles and the baby. She felt as if it were a new beginning. But just as she was releasing herself into the present, she and Charles were summoned to Hopewell for the trial of John Hughes Curtis.

  Anne dreaded the trip, but when they got there, they saw the house, white and gleaming, cool and peaceful—with little trace of the crime. A picture of the baby, a burn mark from the fingerprinting on the stairway, but, on the whole, welcoming and peaceful. Anne went to the nursery and opened wide the big French window, sinking into the security of her life before the kidnapping. When she walked out of the room, she left the door open behind her.56

  Buoyed by the prospect of the birth of her child, Anne began again to write her book. The process exorcised whatever demons remained. She wanted to concentrate her thoughts on a central theme, but was capable only of straight narratives. The themes, the focal point, she wrote, had not emerged.57

  She tried to infuse Hopewell with new life, banishing memories of Charlie’s kidnapping. But just as she began to master her fears, more threatening letters arrived. Now she and Charles decided to hire a guard and buy a police dog, trained to attack intruders, so that they could live in their own home, not in Englewood. The dog trainer explained that it would take two weeks to establish a relationship, but, he assured them, the dog, a trained German shepherd, would be completely loyal and obedient. With the fearlessness of “a liontamer,” Charles got inside the dog’s cage. Within hours, Charles had mastered the dog and taken him out for a stroll on a leash.58

  Anne delighted in the absurdity of having a canine bodyguard. He made her feel very important as he followed her up and down the stairs. It was like having a lovesick boyfriend.59

  Back at Next Day Hill to spend the remaining weeks of her pregnancy in the comfort of her parents’ home, Anne cherished and enjoyed the baby growing within her. While Charles studied bacteriology at the Rockefeller Institute, Anne sat in the sun and swam in the pool, feeling young and slim in the weightlessness of the water.60

  Sadly, she noted she was letting go of Charlie. The “numbness,” she theorized, was a kind of physical protection from the finality of death. She quoted Emily Dickinson in her diary:

  This is the hour of lead

  Remembered if outlived

  As freezing persons recollect

  The snow—

  First chill, then stupor, then

  The letting go.

  Thoughts of death enveloped Anne; it was as though she owed a cosmic debt. There were times when she could not bear the guilt of her survival or the joy of giving birth to another child. Her guilt and rage, still unexpressed, made her fear that she would lose control.

  At midnight on August 16, Anne’s birth pangs began. By dawn, she was at her parents’ apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street in New York. As with Charlie’s birth, she was attended by Marie Cummings, the nurse, Dr. E. M. Hawks, the obstetrician, and Dr. P. J. Flagg, the anesthetist. The gas was administered, and Anne descended into unconsciousness.

  While Charlie’s birth had felt like a hazy banishment from youth, this time it was like a fall into an abyss.61 As if her self-contempt were pursuing her, she heard a voice, like the Grand Inquisitor, taunting her with questions.

  Sometimes the voice told her the answer: Life was a “cheap trick,” vacant of meaning. She screamed out in rebellion against the lie.

  Moving in and out of consciousness, feeling contempt for the petty concerns of those around her, and for men, who could not possibly understand a woman’s experience, she wondered whether the heightened awareness of birth was analogous to the experience of death.62

  While Anne struggled f
or consciousness and release, the doctors worried about the effect her long labor might have on the baby. After several hours, they delivered the baby by cesarean section.63

  Finally, Anne became conscious, feeling sore but weightless, and alert to the unmistakable bleat of her baby. Her mother’s voice, quiet, dear, and full of humor, told her, “A little boy, Anne.” That night, Anne wrote in her diary, “Out of the teeth of sorrow—a miracle. My faith had been reborn.”64

  14

  Death Is the Answer

  Anne Lindbergh with Jon at Next Day Hill, 1934.

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

  And so you died like women long ago,

  died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly,

  the death of those in child-bed, who are trying to close

  themselves again, but cannot do it, because that darkness

  which they also bore returns and grows importunate, and enters.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  Requiem, For A Friend,1

  TRANSLATED BY J. B. LEISHMAN

  AUGUST 1932, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  Anne was so pleased to have a child—strong and male, a Lindbergh. But his birth was not the miracle she had expected. Anne found death everywhere—even in the breath of her newborn son. Conjuring up images of the night of the kidnapping, she wrote, “Nearer at night than morning, nearer in winter than in summer, nearer when the wind is howling or when I hear a child breathing peacefully asleep.”2

  “Death [is] the answer,” Anne reminded herself, quoting again the words of Charles Morgan. Death was part of a natural cycle; the pinnacle of a life in service to a larger ideal. It was no different from the fulfillment of love or work; it was a consummation with immortality.3

  On August 30, after two weeks of rest at the Morrows’ apartment in New York, Anne and the baby returned to Englewood. Charles carried Anne out to the lawn, where she sat beneath a tree and watched her baby take his morning bottle from the nurse. The dogs, excited to see her after so many weeks away, leaped wildly up to greet her, and licked the toes of the baby in the nurse’s arms.

  Home from England, Elisabeth sat in the shade beside Anne. In her new chic hair wave, her black dress, and her black-and-white Paris hat, Elisabeth related the simple joys of life in the English countryside, so different from the frenzied pace of New York.4

  As they passed the last days of summer at Next Day Hill, Elisabeth dared to talk about a man she had come to know in England. Anne sensed that Elisabeth was in love again.5

  Elisabeth had first met Aubrey Morgan in London in the winter of 1930, at a party given by a family friend. While Anne and Charles were flying on their inspection tour for TAT, Elisabeth had sailed to England with her parents for the Disarmament Conference. Aubrey pursued Elisabeth with letters and later “came courting” to the Morrows’ apartment in New York. Aubrey, so unlike the reclusive minister Clyde, was a big man, “a real presence,” not so much handsome as good-natured and jovial.6 He was a practical man of commerce, descended from a family of wealthy merchants from Cardiff, Wales, and he had the breeding of a gentleman. Restrained, proper, and cultivated, he was exactly the husband Betty Morrow might have chosen to care for her sick, precious girl. Marriage, she may have reminded Elisabeth, was the “crown” of a selfless female life. Elisabeth understood that her time was short and that she had no future with Connie. Afraid of being sick and alone, Elisabeth saw marriage as a ticket out of her parents’ house and a statement of her social legitimacy. With Aubrey, Elisabeth said, she felt sturdy and confident, as though “anything seem[ed] possible.”7 To an observer, it may have been another charade: the pretense of health and new beginnings just as her illness was about to tighten its hold. And sex was no longer an issue. The severity of the damage to Elisabeth’s heart valve precluded frequent sexual intercourse; Aubrey would have to get her doctor’s permission each time they wanted to make love.8

  Even as Anne rejoiced in Elisabeth’s happiness, she was beginning to understand that most of her life was beyond her control. Two weeks later, Elisabeth’s announcement of her engagement to Aubrey was another sign that Anne’s childhood was far behind. Elisabeth, too, was slipping away. Her mother was still at the center of their lives, but she and her sisters and brother looked outward toward the world, building new loyalties and establishing new patterns of living.9

  The presence of her new baby softened everything. She would catch herself thinking of him as Charlie. She had to remind herself over and over that this baby was separate and different from him.10 He was quick, lean, and muscular—not her “fat little lamb.” They named him Jon, a name they had found in a Scandinavian history book. Jon, she implied, would be his own person—nobody’s brother and nobody’s junior.11 Once again, Anne measured the beauty of her son by his resemblance to Charles.12

  As the leaves began to fall from the tulip trees, Anne wrestled with the idea of “time.” Time was not linear, she concluded; it was determined by associations, moods, and sensations.13 As usual, she searched for literary paradigms with which to clarify and crystallize her thoughts. She attributed her understanding to her reading of Proust, but she had also discovered Freud’s notion of memory—a web of memories encircling a core. One wrong thought, one dark feeling, and she was caught in the net of the kidnapping. Unfortunately, Anne’s fears were continually confirmed.

  A week after she arrived at her mother’s with Jon, a deranged man broke through the guarded gate and called to Betty Gow at night through the window. Anne and Charles decided immediately to have someone with Jon at all times. Perhaps she was right; the kidnapping was “eternal.” Perhaps they would always live in its shadow.14 But at least the press had slackened its pace. Charles had made a public plea that reporters leave their new son alone. Publicity, he said, may have brought about the death of their first child. Their children had the right to grow up like “normal Americans.”15

  Anne still felt hunted. When she left the confines of the estate, even for an afternoon in the city, she felt out of place and in danger. One day, as she shopped in Macy’s, someone recognized her, and a crowd of thrill-seekers began to pursue her. It was a “madhouse,” she wrote. Catching herself in the store mirror, Anne was shocked by what she saw. She looked pale, worried, and out of shape. Barely twenty-six, she felt haggard and old. She rushed back to Englewood where she belonged—to her family and the fortress of her mother’s home.16

  Safety, however, exacted its price. Anne was rarely alone with Charles. Even though Jon was only a month old, on September 13 she left him in the care of Betty Gow at Next Day Hill and flew to North Haven in the same rented biplane Charles had used when teaching her to fly. When they reached Portland, Anne took the controls. As always, flying gave her balance and perspective.17

  During these early days of September in North Haven, tinged with the red-leafed promise of fall, Anne sharpened her skills of observation. Everything was vulnerable, so she tried to preserve each moment in images—of Elisabeth and her mother walking the dogs, golf among the shimmering birch trees, tennis on the lawn, the fiery northern lights of a summer night, an afternoon picnic with Charles on the White Islands. Her diary had almost a pointillistic pattern, bathed in the refractions of soft island light. They were literary portraits, family tableaux, hung in sequence as if in a museum, preserved in the art of her words.

  Anne was happy again, but even in North Haven, the wind and darkness brought their terror. She still could not accept the death of Charlie.18

  Sadly, Anne was alone in her grief. Except for the investigation, Charles had put the kidnapping behind him. It was only seven months since the baby was taken, yet Charles could not tolerate Anne’s sorrow or tears. She was beginning to see that their emotional needs were pushing them apart. Charles’ persona of “strength” lay in his denial of the very emotions which might have healed her. Depriving herself of the right to mourn, Anne prayed for the courage to survive.

  When sh
e returned to Englewood on September 27, after two weeks away, Anne saw Jon with fresh eyes; he was big, round, pink, and long. She was thrilled to tend to him again—and his nose even looked smaller.19

  But the vulnerability of their fame was made evident. In November, Charles L. Jodney, an unemployed carpenter and father of nine children, was jailed for threatening Betty Morrow.20 Destitute and unemployed, Jodney had sent Betty two letters, pleading for money. When Betty wrote back that he must ask his community for help, he threatened her and her family with bodily harm. It was the first case in New England under the new federal extortion statute, enacted after the kidnapping.

  Afraid for Jon’s safety, Anne and Charles decided not to return to Hopewell. It was Charles who made the final decision; they would give the home and the land to the state to be used as a sanctuary for children.21 It made Anne feel she was giving something back—restoring the life that Charlie had lost. Helping children would “make good out of evil.”22

  Charles, Anne wrote, was working hard and seemed happier and more productive than he had in a long time. He continued his research at the Rockefeller Institute, under the direction of Alexis Carrel. By the fall of 1932, the Nobel Laureate, impressed by Charles’s intelligence and skill, had invited him to join the technical staff.23 At sixty, Carrel was old enough to be Charles’s father, and while there was a mentor-student quality to their relationship, he treated Charles as a peer.24 Charles and Carrel were refining the perfusion pump, which perfused animal organs in such a way as to mimic certain aspects of the body’s biochemistry. They hoped to devise a method for repairing human organs outside the body. When Carrel was chided in the press for his flamboyance—his strange habit of wearing a black robe and cap in the operating room—Charles publicly applauded him for his innovative methods and his generosity of spirit. Anne would later say that Carrel gave Charles the chance to fulfill the dream he had had as a child, working with his grandfather in his laboratory in Detroit.25