Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  For the moment, however, the trial had set her free. Finally, she believed, justice would be done. For the first time since Charlie’s death, Anne stopped running, allowing her thoughts and her grief to come to the surface. Over and over she dreamed of Elisabeth, permitting herself to feel the loss. The Elisabeth of her dreams carried Anne through “strange temples” and long dark hallways. But one dream had an unexpected twist: Elisabeth was tired and upset, and Anne was beginning to feel like a burden. They went through a door into a large, enclosed piazza, and Anne sat down to read a magazine. Suddenly their roles were reversed; Anne was carrying Elisabeth, who sobbed and clung and demanded her comfort.19

  Words were the key—Anne reflected when she awoke—not those written in the privacy of her diary, but in the open piazza, the public square. Only then could she stand on her own and carry the weight of Elisabeth’s legacy.

  Harold Nicolson, who was to write Dwight’s biography, had become the unexpected midwife to Anne’s work. He saw her as a gentle and sensitive young woman caught in a bizarre and punitive drama, and he labored daily to gain her trust. It was he, in fact, who had read her magazine article about her transatlantic flight and who made sure to let her know he thought it “excellent.” Charles was too close to the experience and too invested in her work to be anything but critical; Nicolson, however, gave her hope that her slow “illogical mind” could understand aspects of life worth recording. The baby was dead, but she was alive, and she did not want her writing to be “crushed … smothered … hurt.” If she couldn’t write, “someone should kill this thing in me … [and] send me back to children.”20

  While Anne built barricades against the trial, the public knew no bounds, and those who strutted upon its stage moved with a heightened sense of drama. After the Lindberghs and their servants had been heard, those who professed to have seen Hauptmann took the stand, and Reilly gave the public the show it desired. The prosecution gathered circumstantial evidence, and the defense had nothing but theory. Witness after witness came to the stand, pointed at Richard Hauptmann, and became subject to Reilly’s attempt to cast doubt on their credibility. His tactic was to belittle their character and to jar their memory, building suspicion in each juror’s mind. Although he often lost the game, he played his hand well. He managed to make Hochmuth, the eighty-one-year-old neighbor of the Lindberghs who claimed to have seen the murderer on the day of the crime, look like a half-blind, incompetent meddler; he managed to undermine the reliability of Perrone, the taxi driver who had acted as the liaison between Cemetery John and Dr. Condon.

  But Condon was a fierce opponent, one who could chase Reilly around the ring. The New York Times did not need a dramatist to describe the courtroom scene. Condon was the protagonist, the playwright, and the director. And there was justice in his tone of authority. Lindbergh had taken a ride, heard a voice, and paid a fee; it was Condon who had made a pact with the devil. But if he was the biggest star among the witnesses, he was also the prime target for the defense. While he and Wilentz smoothly walked through the ten-week sequence of events between the crime and the discovery of the baby’s body, Condon and Reilly vied for the attention of the court. Recognizing Condon’s narcissism, Reilly flattered his keen powers of observation and admired the quality of his physical prowess—and managed to press Condon against the ropes. But, to the delight of the spectators, not for long.21

  As the contenders battled in public, Anne wrestled with her inner voices and sought comfort from her friends. Corliss Lamont, the gentle and philosophical son of the Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, had come to commiserate with her during the trial. To Anne’s surprise, they discussed Elisabeth, love, and “a woman’s place.” She delighted in the generosity of Corliss’s mind, grateful not only for his understanding but for his acceptance of who she was. What a relief, she wrote in her diary, that he didn’t try to change her. “Why can’t one keep that admirable distance when one is married, that respect for another person’s solitude?”22

  Her Englewood friend Thelma Crawford Lee tried to encourage her,23 but it was Con’s friend Margot Loines who drew Anne into the nourishing universe of ideas. An aspiring actress, Margot radiated a joie de vivre and moved with grace, precision, and femininity. Anne was quick to recognize the rare confluence of intellect, sensitivity, and strength. A Theosophist, Margot meshed Hindu sacred writings with Protestant ethics, challenging the duality of Christian virtue and sin. She taught Anne to seek, through meditation, a spiritual reality beyond her senses. She celebrated the human mind, validating its wickedness as well as its divinity. Anne later said that Theosophy satisfied her “hunger” to accept the “evil” within herself and in others.24

  Charles worried that he was losing control of Anne. He believed Anne’s dependence on her friends and her diary was a threat to their relationship. For the first time, Anne had secrets. When Anne wanted to meet Con in Boston for a show, Charles balked, insisting it was “disrespectful” to the trial. But there was an inconsistency to his thinking, Anne wrote. “C. so rarely cares about appearance.” Still, Anne did as he said, even though her decision to stay home made her feel like a caged animal, imprisoned in a life she hadn’t created and was powerless to change.

  The trial had allowed the public eye to pierce the walls of her home, affecting even her movements among family. She had feared impropriety, but now there was a greater danger. She was afraid that her rebellious anger toward Charles would make every act, every thought, every dream, every emotion, seem to him an act of betrayal. She wrote:

  I must not talk. I must not cry. I must not write—I must not think—I must not dream. I must control my mind—I must control my body—I must control my emotions … But last night, lying in bed … trying to be like a stone … I felt I could understand insanity and physical violence … anything. 25

  Unable to sleep, Anne took long walks around the estate, seeing figures in the patterns of trees and snow, and reciting poetry. Her struggle with her thoughts seemed to work; she found the courage to write. She wished her writing could rise to the standards of Harold Nicolson’s. She found the first five chapters of his biography of her father an astute and “charming” analysis. He had captured her father well, and, with him, her memories of Elisabeth. She confided to her mother about her book and revealed her grief about her father and Elisabeth. Finally, Anne wrote triumphantly in her diary, she was “purged” of herself.26

  Meanwhile, at the trial, a wood technologist Arthur Koehler, of the U.S. Forestry Service, testified that the wood used for the ladder could be traced to a lumberyard in the northeast Bronx, where Hauptmann had worked. The ladder was linked to Hauptmann in four ways: the place where the wood was purchased; an incomplete sketch of a ladder and a dowel pin in one of his private notebooks; the distinctive tool marks made by Hauptmann’s chisel and plane; and a section of the ladder that matched the floor planks in Hauptmann’s attic. As he listened to the expert’s testimony, Hauptmann, noted a journalist, looked as if the life had been sucked out of him. “His muscular frame sagged in his chair between his guards, and his pale face was whiter than ever.”27

  Hauptmann went back to his cell to scan photocopies of his bank and brokerage accounts. Even though four people, who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the exchange of money and ransom notes, had identified him during the first week of testimony, Hauptmann believed he could prove his innocence by accounting for the money in his possession at the time of the arrest. He attributed his assets of $44,500 to stock investments and to his investments with his business partner, Isidor Fisch. He had already testified that Fisch, shortly before his departure for Germany and subsequent death, had left a package with Hauptmann for safekeeping. Hauptmann had put it on the shelf of his broom closet.28 But it had since been proven that Fisch died homeless and penniless. Between 1932 and 1933, Fisch had made few deposits in his bank, none for more than $700. The Internal Revenue Service had evidence that Hauptmann had only $303.90 at the time of the crime, and that, though his total
assets amounted to less than $5000 before April 2—the day of the ransom exchange—he had spent $15,000 in the subsequent two and a half years.29

  Frustrated by Reilly’s inconsistent and halfhearted efforts, Hauptmann took the stand in his own defense on January 24, three weeks into the trial.30 Reilly tried to portray Hauptmann as a steady wage-earner and family man, living modestly, saving money, and enjoying the small pleasures of camping, playing cards, and making music with his friends. Dressed like a gentleman, in a gray suit, a light-blue shirt, and a dark blue tie, Hauptmann answered Reilly’s questions in halting English. Together they established Hauptmann’s alibis for the night of the kidnapping and the time of the ransom exchange, and reconstructed his relationship with Isidor Fisch. When Wilentz took over, he shot rapid-fire questions at the witness, attempting to expose the inconsistencies in his testimony.31

  Hauptmann leaned forward, with a level stare, and responded in tempo to Wilentz’s fire. Yet despite his effort at self-control, Hauptmann, unaware of his own inconsistencies, permitted Wilentz to establish a pattern of criminality, secrecy, hoarding money, and telling lies. Realizing that he was losing the game, but determined to maintain the battle of wills, Hauptmann taunted Wilentz with smiles, sometimes laughing aloud at the prosecutor’s attempts to entrap him. On the second day, though, Wilentz began to break him down.

  “This is funny to you, isn’t it?” asked Wilentz. “… You think you’re a big shot, don’t you? … Yes. You are the man who has the willpower … Willpower is everything with you, isn’t it?”

  “No. Should I cry?” countered Hauptmann. “… I know I am innocent.”

  But when Wilentz accused him of lying in the face of God, Hauptmann pointed a finger at Wilentz and shouted, “Stop that! … Stop that!”32

  No one could have fabricated a better story: the heroic Lindbergh couple, sweethearts of the world, victims of a brilliant and satanic mind bent on their destruction. That very day, millions read Hauptmann’s testimony. The recording and the transmission of thousands of words a day was seen as a journalistic feat, meeting the demand of a voracious public. The Times called Hauptmann’s self-defense nothing less than thrilling, a real-life masterpiece surpassing the best in fiction.33

  Meanwhile, Judge Trenchard struggled to keep the crowds under control. More than a hundred “witnesses” were subpoenaed daily. Often, they turned out to be friends of the defense attorneys. No longer would the summonses be honored, the judge said. Using the prerogatives of New Jersey law, patterned on the British, Trenchard anguished over every nuance and detail, angering some and gleaming the admiration of others. Ford Maddox Ford, hired by the New York Times for his observations, noted that every one of the judge’s statements “strikes you as the only thing that could be possibly said—by justice that is at once supremely impartial and benevolent … The whole assembly has an air of a family gathering.”34

  Anna Hauptmann gathered her strength to help her husband. She had moved with her baby to a friend’s house in Flemington so that she could see him every day. As direct as her husband was evasive, as trusting as he was cautious, Anna declared his innocence with a shrill wail that seemed the very stuff of tragedy. But Anna’s love for him took an ironic twist when she finally testified on his behalf. After establishing herself as a careful housewife, she could not explain why she hadn’t seen on her closet shelf, for a year and a half, the box filled with thousands of dollars in gold notes. Try as she might to wash her husband clean, she succeeded only in tainting his testimony.35

  Determined to get away from home, Anne disguised herself in bangs and dark brown glasses and went to dine with Margot Loines in the city. Margot was an oasis; along with her sister Con, Margot was among the few in whom Anne could confide. She shared with her the thoughts and impressions, even the contents of the cherished notebook in which she daily recorded snippets of prose and poetry to console and inspire herself.

  Most often, she quoted the Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke, which captured her feelings of abandonment and spiritual alienation. One needn’t go farther than the first lines of Rilke’s First Elegy to see why Anne heard her voice in his words:

  Who, if I cried out would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.36

  If only she could learn to understand the voices of man, God, and nature, she might know what she needed to do, she told Margot.

  On February 9, five weeks into the trial, Anne sneaked into the courtroom through the back door to avoid the camera and the crowds. It was her mother’s turn to testify, and she had promised to be there. It was, she wrote, far worse than the day she testified. She had more time to think and feel and observe the ugly haggling over detail. “How incredible,” she wrote, “that my baby had any connection with this!”37 To Anne, the courthouse was little more than a child’s toy stage set, the kind she had played with as a girl.

  Three days later, the testimony completed, the lawyers vied for the jury’s trust. Banging his fists and pointing his fingers, Reilly summarized the case for the defense much as he had laid it out at the beginning: the unconfirmed character of the servants; the lost evidence at the scene of the crime; the mishandling of the ladder by police and press; the dog that never barked; the possible substitution of the attic plank; the money Hauptmann received from Fisch; and Hauptmann’s alibis for the night of the kidnapping and the time of the ransom exchange. Reilly warned the jury, “Judge not lest you be judged.”38

  The next day, Wilentz summarized the case for the prosecution. Talking to the jury as if they were his living room guests, Wilentz cited the established evidence:39 Lindbergh’s gold certificates in the joists of Hauptmann’s garage; the tracing of the ladder’s wood to Hauptmann’s attic and lumberyard; the fieldglasses; the maps; the sketches; the ransom note stationery; the IRS records that documented Hauptmann’s finances before and after the crime; the implausibility of Fisch’s role; the failure to incriminate the Lindbergh or Morrow servants. Exhausted, Wilentz made a personal and emotional plea for justice. Calling Hauptmann “un-American,” and emphasizing his “animal quality,” Wilentz demanded a conviction without mercy. “I know how difficult it is to believe that one person committed this crime,” he said, “[but] that is not important, because if fifty people did it, if Hauptmann was one of them, that would be all there was to it … All the evidence leads to Hauptmann, only to Hauptmann.”40

  Judge Trenchard addressed the jurors with concluding remarks as trenchant as if the weight of civilized society hung on their decision. He pleaded with them to question all the evidence, to leave no facet unexamined, and to remember that the defendant was presumed innocent unless he was proved otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt:

  The evidence produced by the State is largely circumstantial. In order to justify the conviction of the defendant upon circumstantial evidence, it is necessary not only that all of the circumstances concur to show that he committed the crime charged, but that they are inconsistent with any other rational conclusion. They must exclude the moral certainty of every other hypothesis but the single one of guilt, and if they do not do this, the jury should find the defendant not guilty.41

  He reminded them that the charge was “murder committed in the course of a burglary,” and although it was a charge of the first degree, the court could recommend a sentence of mercy: life imprisonment at hard labor.

  Anne wrote in her diary, “Judge Trenchard’s summation is cool, dignified, wise, and infinitely removed from petty human suffering and yet relevant, just, and true to life.”42

  As the jury deliberated, Anne, Charles, Con, and Betty, along with Harold Nicolson and Aubrey Morgan, sat down to dinner in the Morrow dining room. The wireless radio blasting from the pantry and the drawing room was so loud that jazz and jokes resounded through the house. Charles punctuated the dinner conversation with wild sneezes, the only ungoverned gesture in an otherwise remarkable show of manne
rs and restraint. With dinner over and no verdict yet announced, they retired to the drawing room, noticeably upset. Betty, who conducted the evening as if she were a young teacher just out of Smith, insisted that they hold “a family council” about the “proper illustration” for Nicolson’s book. Obediently, everyone complied, grateful for the diversion to get them through the evening.

  It was past eleven when the jury, after ten hours of deliberation, reached a verdict. The crowds at the courthouse roared as the official radio announcement was made: Hauptmann was guilty—condemned to death, without mercy.

  “A-tishoo! A-tishoo! from Lindbergh,” Nicolson wrote home. “They were all sitting round—Con with embroidery, Anne looking very white and still.”

  “You have now heard,” broke in the announcer, “the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of one of the foulest …” A-tishoo! A-tishoo! A-tishoo. “Turn that off, Charles, turn that off.” Then we went into the pantry and had ginger beer. And Charles sat there on the kitchen dresser looking very pink about the nose. “I don’t know,” he said to me “whether you have followed this case carefully. There is no doubt at all that Hauptmann did the thing. My one dread all these years has been that they would get hold of someone as a victim about whom I wasn’t sure. I am sure about this—quite sure. It is this way …” And then quite quietly, while we all sat round in the pantry, he went through the case point by point. It seemed to relieve all of them … Then we went to bed.43

  Before she slept, Anne noted in her diary that it had been as bad as the first night at Hopewell.44 The howl of the crowds echoed the howl of the wind that whipped around their house the night the baby was taken. Again, man and nature seemed to confirm the evil that killed her child.