Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Hauptmann, it was observed, was “a broken man.” For the first time, he lost control, “sobbing wildly” alone in his cell.45 Anne, too, felt broken—like “a broken pot.”46

  18

  A Room of Her Own

  Anne writing at her desk at North Haven, Maine, summer 1935.

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

  The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman’s life— the number of her children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help in bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of housework was her task—it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF,

  Granite and Rainbow

  SPRING 1935, NEXT DAY HILL, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  Anne sat at a desk in her mother’s home, pouring her rage into her diary. She felt like a victim of God and man, but what could she do? Rail against an inscrutable God? Or her loving husband, as much a victim as she? Or herself, for failing to protect her child? It was impossible to unravel the threads of Charlie’s death; each path led nowhere.

  She knew it was the ordinary things that mattered. They were the “safety, the infinite safety and deliverance from terror.” The hand on one’s shoulder, the leaning of one’s head, the breath of her child, her hand on his curls—these were “the great wells of security and faith” that built the “precious structure of life.”1

  When Smith College offered Anne an honorary degree for her accomplishments in aviation, she was indignant. All she had done, she wrote to Con, was be a good wife. She had done nothing that warranted an award. Nevertheless, Charles was extraordinarily proud, she wrote. Why, she wondered. Because she was a reflection of him?

  Contemplating the poetry of Yeats, she wrote in her diary that “love has nothing to do with happiness, and marriage very little to do with love.”2

  In April, Anne submitted the final draft of her manuscript of North to the Orient to Harcourt Brace. Afraid that they might publish it only because she was Charles’s wife, and just as afraid that they wouldn’t publish it at all, she whipped herself into a panic. Charles panicked, too. On rereading the manuscript, he had said that if he read the first paragraph, he would not read the book. Throughout the week preceding the submission, Charles had edited the manuscript, going through every chapter with painstaking precision, changing the smallest words and phrases. Anne felt she would “burst” with anxiety, but it was better to burst than to die inside. Perhaps, she consoled herself, she should just have another child and worry about “fundamental” things.3

  She had not expected a response for at least a week, but she was called by Mr. Harcourt the following evening, just as she was putting Jon to bed. “It is splendid,” he said. “I would take it even if it were written by Jane Smith. It’s a good story, it’s moving, it’s well-constructed, and parts of it border on poetry.” He wanted to close the deal at his office the next day with her and Charles.4

  Joyful beyond anticipation, Anne went out to the garden, just as she had as a little girl, to take stock of her life. This time she counted her moments of triumph, not her sins: the Jordan Prize for writing that she had won at Smith, her first kiss, Charles’s asking her to marry him, the birth of her children, Harold Nicolson’s confirmation of her ability to write. It wasn’t happiness, she wrote; it was “something fiercer,” and she wondered whether her joy and pride should make her ashamed. But she could not deny a sense of power. They couldn’t be sins, she convinced herself at last. They connected her in a vital way to the flow of life. Finally, she had “a place and a reason for living.” Finally, “I can hold my head up,” she wrote.5

  Within a week, though, reality set in. Writing a book was like having a baby, Anne concluded, and “publishers are like obstetricians.” She would have to let go of the idea that she was “accomplishing God’s mission.”6

  God’s mission or not, the acceptance of the book made her “a real person”—capable, discerning, and articulate. She would never have the energy or the practicality of her mother or Charles, but she had found a way of life and a craft.

  The public announcement of the Carrel-Lindbergh perfusion pump in June, however, confirmed her belief in Charles’s superiority. When the papers proclaimed his feat as sensational, even more important than his historic flight,7 Anne wrote, “[it] is not a fluke, not chance, not charm and youth and simplicity and boyishness, but the expression of a great mind.”8 She, like her mother, believed Charles was the ideal of manhood. Without Charles, she would be nothing. He was the fire through which she burned, the alchemy that changed her base metal into gold.9

  And yet, the more she praised Charles, the more her own life pounded within, like “a giant,” demanding to be free. By mid-August, the pounding stopped. North to the Orient received complete critical acclaim. The Saturday Review wrote, “Mrs. Lindbergh has a seeing eye and a singing heart”10; Newsweek wrote, “She can write as well as she can pilot.”11 Harcourt Brace had printed twenty-five thousand copies, but to everyone’s surprise, including Mr. Harcourt’s, by the end of the first week, Anne’s book was into its third printing.12 The Harcourt Brace salesmen had assumed it would sell on the Lindbergh name, whether or not it had any literary merits of its own, but once the book reached the stores, the dealers gave it their enthusiastic backing. The book was national as well as trade news. Many papers ran front-page stories. Later, it was chosen for a National Booksellers Award as the most distinguished book of general nonfiction for the year.

  But the success fanned her fears. She anguished over what she would write next. Although Charles, as usual, gave her encouragement and perspective, she was beginning to see the price she paid for his borrowed strength. He made it clear that she had to play the game according to his rules. When he asked her to fly with him, she had to go.

  As if to rediscover the roots of his childhood, Charles took Anne on a trip to visit his family in Michigan and Minnesota. In the last week of August, they flew to Detroit to see Charles’s mother, whose mind, wrote Anne, was “tidy,” “accurate,” and “clear.”13 In Anne’s view, at least as presented in her published diary, her mother-in-law had managed to rid herself of volatility and paranoia. Though Anne would always think of Evangeline as strange, she dutifully portrayed her as the essence of restraint and control.

  She and Charles went on to Minnesota to visit Mrs. George Christie, Charles’s half-sister Eva, who had married a newspaperman and lived in a small northern town, Red Lake Falls, with her son, George, and daughter, Lillian. Eva, the brainy and jealous daughter of Mary La Fond and Charles Sr., had blossomed into a pretty, dignified, and independent young woman, wrote Anne. After visiting Charles’s Uncle Frank and Aunt Linda, Anne concluded that the Lindberghs were made of “stern stuff.” On the way home, they returned to Detroit to see Charles’s maternal relatives, the Lodges. They too were stern, recorded Anne, as well as “ascetic” and religious.14

  Once home, Anne had had enough of the Lindberghs, including Charles. She was “oppressed” by his incessant demands. She wanted to be free of him, and she wanted to be alone. He belittled what she valued most—her desire to write letters to her family and friends. “I cannot write letters for I feel C.’s disapproval. I cannot write other things because he is there. I just sit.”15

  Anne convinced herself that she had to accept the extraordinary conditions of marriage to a man whose personality and fame obscured her gifts and dictated the course and direction of her life. How could she achieve the impossible, she asked herself? How could she satisfy Charles’s demands, preserve the integrity of their relationship, and yet satisfy her needs as a woman and a writer? She was beginning to think that marriage was “an impossible ideal,” that husband and wife shou
ld be “further apart.”16 Like Psyche holding a candle to her husband’s face, Anne was beginning to understand that Charles, in spite of his public image, was painfully vulnerable. There were distortions in his personality that permeated their relationship, but she would never be free until she could define them.

  In September 1935, Alexis Carrel published his book, Man, the Unknown.17 In it, he proposed a relationship between mental acuity and moral perception and the influences of disease and environment on each person’s physical and psychological health. He urged the reader to see himself in the context of both human history and his individual biological ancestry, and he set forth “scientific evidence” to support the genetic determination of one’s mental and physical attributes. His bias became clear in his advocacy of constructing a “genetic elite” through the voluntary practice of eugenics—the sterilization of those who could not produce healthy and intelligent progeny. In this context, women were viewed as childbearing vehicles, measured according to their social use in creating a hereditary aristocracy. We must be “reasonable” and “economical,” he wrote. Criminality and insanity could be prevented only by eugenics and by changes in education and social conditions. Prisons should be abolished. Criminals should be whipped, sterilized, or gassed. Conventional modes of thought and systems of ethics must be dismissed as sentimental in the face of necessity. “The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilization,” he wrote.

  His book was reflective of the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States,18 legitimated by the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck vs. Bell,19 but it was still considered extreme and ridiculous by most educated people. The press deplored the pseudo-science that camouflaged the author’s misogyny and racism. Time magazine called it a “wild rant” and “a colossal joke.”20 Proliferating reviews blasted Carrel for his racism, ignorance, and unscientific methods, but Anne and Charles remained publicly silent.

  And then Anne, determined to write her book, and frustrated by Charles’s demands and by the constant flow of her mother’s “do-gooder friends,” withdrew. Solitude, she wrote, made her less volatile and less vulnerable. She was most free when she was alone. Charles, as if fearing the separation Anne sought, frequently knocked at her closed door. He “whistled” for her when she was working on her book and invited her to fly with him. Though enraged by his intrusions, Anne complied and, for the first time, played with the idea of losing Charles. But just as the fantasy took hold, she raised him once again to the status of savior. Without his energy and competence, she would be “incredibly empty.” “Without Charles, [she] would lose life and the whole purpose of life.”21 But it seemed as though she protested too much.

  As she studied the plans for their transatlantic trip, Anne decided to write an allegorical narrative. While the allegory in North to the Orient seemed an afterthought, this time she patterned her book on a classical model. Each trip was an odyssey, a voyage “home,” but this one had the taste of hell. Terribly discouraged by her lack of progress, she burrowed her way through “the pit,” hoping to turn her rage into passion.

  “The pit” was wider than she had imagined, and Harold Nicolson had fallen in. While Anne saw his biography of her father as a finely crafted “composition” that restored Dwight Morrow’s legacy of “strength, tolerance, and wisdom,” reviewers noted Nicolson’s inability to put Morrow’s life in historical perspective and to draw conclusions relative to the present.22 In the end, it was clear that Nicolson did not understand Morrow, his accomplishments, or the American social phenomenon he had represented.

  In the wake of Nicolson’s failure, Anne realized the folly of her timidity. Instinctively, she knew she had to write, and she began to burst with ideas. She had so much to say that she could not write fast enough. She felt “rooted and unshakable,” as she had never felt before. Even the wind had lost its potency. During a visit with the Guggenheims at Falaise, Anne looked at the sea and saw “eternity.”

  Determined to stop “running,” Anne sought a quiet place outside her mother’s home in which to write her book. In late November, just before the first anniversary of Elisabeth’s death, Anne rented an apartment designated solely for her work. As she placed her books on the shelves and hung her paintings on the walls, Anne comforted herself with the “immortality” of Elisabeth’s legacy: “Courage, memory, and love.” Finally, Anne had given herself permission to write. Her talent, commitment, and affluence had produced that rare specimen of humanity that Virginia Woolf called the female writer.

  But Anne’s victory was as short-lived as it was momentous. In spite of the vigilance of the state and city police and the FBI, Jon, now three years old, was the object of constant threats. The final act of harassment came when reporters stalked Jon on his way to school. Sideswiping the Morrows’ car, they pushed it off the road and pulled open the doors to take the boy’s picture. Within hours, Charles and Anne decided to leave America.23

  19

  Crossing Over

  Anne, Charles, and Jon arrive in Liverpool, England, December 1935.

  (Popperfoto)

  We, local and ephemeral as we are, are not one moment contented in the world of time nor confined in it; we keep on crossing over and over to our predecessor, to our descent and to those who came after us.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  Duino Elegies

  DECEMBER 1935, ABOARD THE AMERICAN IMPORTER

  In the early morning hours of December 22, 1935, the Lindberghs slipped quietly out to sea on a freighter bound for England. Standing bareheaded on the deck, Charles saluted the Statue of Liberty as they navigated the inland waters toward the open sea.1 With a sense of betrayal as passionate as his Swedish grandfather’s nearly eighty years earlier, Charles was crossing back to Europe in the hope of anonymity and peace.

  At strict orders from Charles, the ship was empty, and no one came to say good-bye.2 Betty Morrow and Con had waved to them from the big front door as their limousine disappeared around the curve down Next Day Hill. Arriving at the dock on Manhattan’s West Side, they registered under assumed names and presented diplomatic passports. Even the crew didn’t know who their only passengers were.

  Christmas at sea would be lonely, but it would also be free from fear for the first time since the children were born. As Anne walked with Jon up the gangplank toward the forward deck and down through the darkened halls to their stateroom, she was tired and apprehensive but pleased with their decision.

  She had felt rootless since leaving Hopewell. The lack of privacy at Englewood, the publicity surrounding the trial, and the efforts of the New Jersey governor to commute Hauptmann’s death sentence had created an atmosphere of hostility.3 “It was as though the Lindbergh family were living alone on a frontier, their home surrounded by savages,” commented the Times.

  On their second day at sea, amid the roar of wind and rain, Anne noted in her diary that their hasty exit had made quite a “splash.” It was “rather shocking,” she wrote, but it was as if, by their own hand, the American people had forced the exile of their native son.4 While the Lindberghs blamed their departure on the intrusions and distortions of the press, the press was divided against itself, blaming its lowly tabloid brethren for pushing the Lindberghs to desperation. But not even the most self-righteous newspapers had resisted the Lindberghs’ story. Front pages were filled with sensationalized versions of the facts, even as the editors preached holy abstinence. The Christian Science Monitor wrote that “newspapers more than kidnappers have exiled the Lindberghs,” and Time magazine added that long ago “the Press at large concluded that Hero Lindbergh’s real Herod was yellow journalism.”5 The cannibalization of the Lindberghs by the press reached the absurd when Viscount Rothermere printed an editorial, in the London Daily Mirror, entitled “Leave Them Alone” while simultaneously covering his front page with news of the Lindberghs’ crossing.6

  But the public searched for deeper reasons. On Christmas Day, there was an outcry in the United States a
gainst the “alien” and “criminal” elements responsible for the “outrage” of the Lindberghs’ departure for England. Bruno Richard Hauptmann had become the xenophobes’ symbol of the inferior, uneducated, and morally bankrupt “aliens” who had flooded the American cities at the turn of the century; to the eugenics movement, the Lindberghs were martyrs. Ironically, the public did not know that Charles was the grandson of a Swedish immigrant who had been a convicted felon and a fugitive from the law.

  While the English public thrilled to the prospect of the Lindberghs’ arrival, observers saw little to suggest that life in England would offer them much consolation. “It reminds one somewhat of the frog who dived into the pond to avoid getting wet in the rain,” wrote a satirist for the Paris Oeuvre.7 He couldn’t see how the Lindbergh child could be any more secure in England than in the States. The frequency of child abduction was as high in England as in America, he wrote.

  In fact, that was not true. During the preceding two years, there had been sixty-three kidnappings in America; in England there had been four, according to public record.8 Furthermore, there was no complicated process of appeal in England. Criminals were punished swiftly and severely, by imprisonment or by hanging.9

  As the storms at sea raged, and little Jon grew paler and more seasick each day, Anne cared for him with an intensity she had never achieved at home. Wholly responsible for Jon while Charles conferred and dined with the ship’s captain, Anne’s priorities were instantly rearranged. Suddenly, her anxiety became academic. Concentrating on the routine tasks of tending to Jon, she had no time to contemplate her writing. When a wave crashed through the window, threatening Jon with an “impersonal force” like the one that had overtaken Charlie, Anne wrote, “How could I have longed for anything else? Let me get safely there.”10