Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  On April 16, she did consent to accompany Charles on an inspection tour for Transcontinental and Western Air. In October of 1930, Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express had merged, establishing America’s first all-air coast-to-coast passenger service.7 Charles continued to work for the new conglomerate, purchasing planes and mechanical parts. On this trip, Charles was to inspect a new super-speed transport that would carry passengers between New York and Los Angeles in eighteen hours. Anne dreaded the publicity and the long hours in the back cockpit, but soon the sheer beauty of the countryside won her over. Distracting herself by reciting poetry, and delighted by the good weather and their safe landings, Anne relaxed. Once again, as she had during her early flights west with Charles, she felt that “the world was made for us.”8

  Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Columbus, St. Louis, Kansas City, Kingman—thousands of people came out to greet them each time they landed. As if to help them leave their tragedy behind, the public cheered their heroes on. After twelve days, Anne and Charles arrived in Los Angeles, the Promised Land—and she found that the broad green valleys, neat orchards, and big highways reminded her of Charlie. She had been pregnant with him on their flight to Los Angeles in 1930, and Charlie was still more real than Jon, even though Jon waited at home. Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, growing big and small, Anne tried to get back to “the right size” by amusing herself on the beaches of Los Angeles Bay. While Charles met with technicians and officials, Anne walked the shoreline, absorbed by the “unfold and slide” of the waves. Disguised in beach pajamas and smoked glasses, she roller-skated on the big concrete walk above the Palisades.9

  But quickly her mood turned grim when, three weeks later, they were caught in a fog while flying back east. They were playing hide and seek with death and she closed her eyes and cried in terror that Death would “flow” right through her.10 She chastised herself for not having faith in Charles; she believed her terror grew from her lack of faith.

  In mid-May, a month after they had left, Anne and Charles returned to Englewood and Anne was happy to be home again with Jon. Charles, encouraged by the success of their California trip, began to plan another long-range survey. This time, he decided, they would fly across the Atlantic, first to Greenland and Iceland, and then to the continent. From France, they would fly south through Africa and circle home by way of South America. Charles estimated that the trip would take five months and planned to leave in early July. Jon would be eighteen months old when they returned, and their flights would have taken them from him for a third of his life. Yet Anne agreed. Perhaps her acquiescence was not merely to please Charles. Those around her believed she was afraid of getting too close to Jon.

  They painted the Lockheed Sirius they had flown to Asia red and black and equipped it with a 710–horsepower Wright Cyclone engine and pontoons for landing on water. Their goal was to “link the continents by water routes,” the last remaining barrier to commercial flight. They would test new equipment and gather slides of airborne microbes at high altitudes. Charles designed the plane for “total independence,”11 with sophisticated radios and large fuel reserves, ensuring their safety in the icy north and along the sweltering Equator.

  By June, Anne was back to practicing her Morse code. But all her preparations for the flight were infused with memories of Charlie; she worried about the safety of Jon in their absence. This time, her mother-in-law agreed to keep watch in Maine, along with Betty Gow, Elsie Whateley, and hired guards. Evangeline’s presence, along with the promise of an escort ship and a radio base in Greenland, eased her fears.12

  By month’s end, however, death was again on her trail. Elisabeth had suffered another heart attack at her home in Wales. This time, Anne resolved not to be afraid. She had rehearsed everyone’s death, even her own. Determined to leave a written legacy should she die in flight, Anne wrote a statement on July 8 and tucked it into her diary; it outlined her philosophy of mothering and her hopes for Jon. She wanted him to be sensitive and self-sufficient, but she feared he would be over-protected and lose the strength to stand alone. She hoped he would “meet [life] with optimism and courage and zest like his father and his grandfather.”13

  Anne and Charles left on July 9 from North Beach, New Jersey, stopping in North Haven to say good-bye to the Morrows, just as they had done two years earlier. Once more the townspeople crowded the harbor in their boats to greet them. Anne was struck by the frailty of her family alongside the permanent beauty of the islands. And yet she knew they would always protect her, and she could always come home.14

  Anne would write home often, she promised her mother; her letters would give a purpose to her trip.15

  As they flew east through Greenland and Iceland, though, Anne’s letters glazed with distance. She sent home detailed descriptions of the mountains and the sky, the buildings and the houses, the lush gardens and the colorful dress of the Eskimos, but there was little expression of her emotions. While it was Anne’s duty to keep a record of her impressions, she had left at home all that was real. Only when she watched the Eskimos dance did she begin to feel alive again. Expressing a theme which permeates her writing, she compares the perfect pattern of their music to the rhythms of the cycles of life.16

  As they flew through the Shetland Islands toward the Continent, Anne’s fears did become manifest; they were like an animal “hunger.” Now deep into the trip, nearly six weeks, Anne realized it would be months before she could return home. All at once, her rage at Charles surfaced. He was asking her to live a life that was not her own. She had wanted to “stand alone” and survive in Charles’s world, she wrote, but she knew she would always, in other people’s eyes, be an extension of him, an appendage.17 And her love for Charles was not the same, she concluded in her diary. It was no longer the “young-girl love” built on a dream and an ideal.18 “Damn, damn, damn! I am sick of being this ‘handmaid to the Lord.’”19

  She wanted the “world of her own” she had tasted with Charlie during their first summer in Princeton—a world of creativity, home, and children. She wanted to “live simply, and have a garden and sun and work and a little girl—to play with Jon.”20 But as they carved their circle from the Shetland Islands across Denmark, Norway, Russia, and back to England, Anne had little hope that this world would ever be. She knew Charles would not accept her need to stay home.

  Arriving in Cardiff on October 5, Anne and Charles visited Elisabeth and Aubrey. The weather was damp and dreary, but Elisabeth’s rented house was “ablaze” with flowers. Beyond the white gate and fence, the drive was lined with fiery dahlias, and the old stone-wall house was covered with webs of tangled ivy. Elisabeth, at the door, looked as long and thin as a painted “portrait.”21 All her vitality flowed from her eyes—her eyes and her flaming red shoes, which clicked along the stone path as she ran to greet them.

  She was at once strange and familiar, like an actress playing a role in someone else’s dream of the way life ought to be. Elisabeth conducted her life with the skill of “one of Chaucer’s model housewives,” Anne wrote. And there was a new sobriety in Elisabeth’s words. She was beginning to accept the facts of her illness, she told Anne, and was trying to come to terms with her constant chest pain.22 After two days of polite talk and playful banter, Elisabeth said good-bye to Anne and Charles at the door. To Anne, she still looked like a portrait—life arrested in the glaze of art. Once again, her life had become a sequence of rituals dictated by social propriety. It was as if Elisabeth had traded her parents’ “golden cage” for Aubrey’s country squire landscape. Anne thought the prospect of death had made reality more inaccessible. She did not burden Elisabeth with her doubts about Charles.

  They flew east to Southampton, then north to Scotland and Ireland, and circled down the coast of France to Paris. Paris was “one hectic rush,” Anne wrote, full of ceremony and an intrusive press.23 The French still regarded Charles as the Fairy Prince, and she and he had to fight crowds wherever they went. But it was not the c
rowds who were their enemy. Fog stalked them on their way to Amsterdam, and memories of the “white walls” of Japan gripped Anne with terror. She tried to keep her faith in Charles, but suddenly she lost control. “Wildly” she thought of going home, of taking the train back to Paris, of leaving Charles and never flying again. But imagining the headlines was enough to rivet her in place.24

  “Are you getting a divorce, Mrs. Lindbergh?” the reporters would ask.

  “Damn the newspapers,” concluded Anne.

  Filled with physical terror, Anne resolved never to live this way again. When she returned home, she would find her place. Now, however, it was her duty to go on with the trip, to go “the whole way” with her husband, as she wrote to her mother.25

  Impatient to get home, counting the days as Thanksgiving and Christmas approached, Anne forced herself to restrain her emotions. But her letters assumed a haunting quality during the flight through Spain and Portugal toward the islands off the coast of Africa. Anne listened to the wind as it whirled and howled, reminding her of the night of the kidnapping, making them its plaything, determining the course and pace of their flight. Without the wind, they could not fly; once in its grip, they lost control. It became for her a defining metaphor, and Anne hunted for its meaning. The more they were tossed by the whim of the wind, the more frenetically Anne wrote in her diary.

  The Cape Verde Islands were parched and brown. The once bustling French seaport of Praia reeked with disease and death. Now a nearly abandoned port-of-call, to Anne it was a remnant of a dying empire. They were forced to stay overnight in the stationmaster’s house, which Anne feared was contaminated by yellow fever. She felt lost in the land of “the Damned.” Again they were playthings of the wind as they waited impatiently for it to rise. The next day, November 27, it blew cold and hard, and three days later, Thanksgiving Day, Anne held her breath as they took flight, first bouncing and stalling on the choppy sea and then suddenly aloft and free, she wrote, bound for the English colony of Bathurst on the western coast of Gambia.26

  Despite the veneer of English gentility and the careful impression of propriety and order, Bathurst was another vacuous land. Even amid the lavish government houses, plentiful food, elegant dress and manners of their hosts, Anne felt no less a prisoner of the wind. And Charles felt his ship had failed him. He tried to lighten the plane by siphoning off fuel and unloading equipment, but the only reasonable course was to wait for the deadening calm of the air to change. The nights at Bathurst once again echoed the night of the kidnapping, when life was snuffed out by the howl of the wind.

  “Listen!” Anne wrote in her diary, quoting Humbert Wolf’s poem entitled “Autumn: Resignation”: “The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves.”27 But if the wind was the instrument of death, it was also Anne’s only hope for Christmas at home with Jon. Two days later, their plane was up and rising. The engine sounded like “a person breathing, easily, freely, almost like someone singing, ecstatically climbing.”28

  Even as Anne counted the days and wished for home, Charles, unhindered by anyone’s schedule, conducted himself like a boy on a fishing trip. After flying southwest to Natal, Brazil, he decided to take a thousand-mile side trip up the Amazon to Manaus, Port-of-Spain, and Puerto Rico, delaying their return home by three weeks. Anne, crestfallen, refrained from complaining and chose once more to obey.29 When they landed in Miami on December 16, the city seemed to explode with life—signs and shops and billboards and people. So close to home, Anne was thrilled to receive a wire from her mother in New York: the baby was fine and waiting for them in Englewood.30

  But three days later, hours from home, flying from Charleston up the coast to New York, Anne was overtaken by fear. The abstract notion of “home,” which had propelled her forward day by day, buttressing her strength and galvanizing her will, seemed another ring of Hell. Already, she felt torn by pressures and obligations: the press, the ceremonious fawning of officials, caring for the baby, finding a place to live, writing a new book, making Charles happy. The flight, in retrospect, seemed easy. She had had one task to do, and Charles was her master. Now, she had to please the world. She must, she wrote in her diary,31 have the courage to say “no.”

  After a chase by cameramen in planes dangerously close to theirs, Anne and Charles landed at College Point, Long Island. Once on the ground, they slipped by reporters into the Edo Aircraft factory and out the front door. To the press, the Lindberghs were heroes returning from a grand adventure. They raised the world above the squalor and hopelessness of the Depression. Home safe after thirty thousand miles of flight, tanned, vibrant, and smiling, they seemed nothing less than a miracle. The New York Tribune pictured the hand of God, cupped over white-capped waves, cradling a silver biplane. Although the plane was misrepresented—the Tingmissartoq32 was a low-winged monoplane—the message was clear: the Lindberghs’ mission had been worthy of God’s protection. The irony, of course, was that news about the Lindberghs sold newspapers, and while God might protect them, the press would not.

  Back in the routine of Next Day Hill, Anne found life on the ground chaotic. Jon was “spoiled,” and everyone seemed to know how to handle him better than she did.33 She took him out to Falaise to visit the Guggenheims for three days, hoping to establish again their old rapport. But a return to Next Day Hill to face Christmas at home without her mother, Con, and Dwight Jr. was more than Anne could handle. They had gone to spend the holidays with Elisabeth and Aubrey, who had moved to Pasadena.

  Disheartened by her prognosis but still optimistic, Elisabeth was wheeled around her garden in a custom-made bed, certain that she was shocking the neighbors with her unconventional vehicle for sunbathing. Again like an actress on the stage, she told everyone that it was actually fun to stay in bed, and that she felt certain—down to the very marrow of her bones—that she was healing. In truth she felt like a kept woman, an invalid who had to paint her face to please her master.34 She missed her family in Englewood and she missed her school. When she married Aubrey the year before, Elisabeth had delegated the school’s directorship to her mother and its daily operations to Connie Chilton. Although Elisabeth believed that her vision was being honored, she missed the sense of fulfillment she had gained with it.

  Elisabeth had a gift for pretense; Anne had none. In the weeks after Christmas she was miserable in Englewood, and everyone knew it. After being alone with Charles for five months, Anne was restrained by the surveillance of her mother. There were too many opinions, she wrote, too many servants, and no privacy. Concerned about the safety of Jon, now sixteen months old, Anne and Charles decided to rent an apartment in the city rather than a house in the country. She had found a “rather small place,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, a penthouse with two terraces, a sunny one for Jon and the other with beautiful views of the skyline for her and Charles. Jon would sleep in the adjoining room, and they would keep the dogs with them for protection. And she would begin to write the narrative of their transatlantic trip.35

  While Anne wrestled with her discontent, her public image shone brighter than ever. The only female flyer who had crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific to Japan, Anne was awarded the Hubbard Gold Medal by the National Geographic Society. Her skill on the wireless radio, the society declared, ranked her as a world expert. The course of her flights, wrote the New York Times, “should be marked on every map in every school room. The boys already have their circumnavigator. The girls now have theirs.”36

  The Lindberghs’ popularity was at an all-time high. Newsweek reported that Charles Lindbergh’s signature was worth more than that of any celebrity alive—at least fifty dollars. Organizations, schools, and the media used the Lindbergh name to bring honor and profit to themselves. The Veteran Wireless Operators Association gave Anne a gold medal, Smith College honored her sister Constance, and even Charles Lindbergh, Sr., was resurrected as a prophet. The publishers Dorrance and Company reprinted his 1918 book, Your Country at War, claiming that his writings had foreshadowed the
National Recovery Act and Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.37 They hoped that his son would be pleased by their actions. Charles was pleased, probably more than he let on. He was learning to use his popularity as a political tool.

  On February 9, 1934, citing collusion, President Roosevelt ordered the cancellation of all commercial airmail contracts. Although it appeared to be an act of belligerence against the airline industry, it was the culmination of a long series of investigations. Ever since the Kelly Act of 1925, when the airplane was recognized as a viable adjunct to the postal service, the postmaster general had had the authority to award airline contracts at his discretion. But it wasn’t until the McNary-Watres Act of 1930, which gave him the power to transmit airmail payments to commercial carriers, that his authority began to have real implications for the airline industry.

  In May and June of 1930, Postmaster General Walter F. Brown hosted what became known as the “Spoils Conferences.” The purpose of the meetings was to divide the airmail contracts among invited representatives of all the major airlines. Uninvited smaller operators were not welcome. These secret meetings led to wild stock promotions and tens of millions of dollars to airline promoters, who invested little or no cash. The larger companies gobbled up the smaller ones, creating huge conglomerates and millions of dollars for entrepreneurs and stock owners, who in large part happened to be Republicans. In the summer of 1931, a small airline spurned by Brown leaked the news to the press. The result was a congressional investigation that exposed the machinations of Brown and the airlines.38

  Lindbergh was linked to the scandal when it became known that he had received twenty-five thousand shares of TAT stock, valued at $250,000, as well as the option for twenty-five thousand shares at a preferential price when he became a technical adviser in 1928. When the Democrats and Roosevelt came to power in March 1933, the pressure was high to redress the injustice.