by Susan Hertog
The other children had developed their means of coping with Charles. Jon, earlier than the others, had learned to keep the peace by acting obedient and remaining silent; Land, now a cattle rancher in Montana, chose to keep the buffer of distance between them. Sunny-faced Reeve seemed unscathed until long into adulthood when she could face the emptiness of her father’s absences and the fullness of his rage. Even as she treasured her mother’s sensibilities, she questioned her timidity and emotional reticence.
Anne spent the spring of 1963 alone in their chalet in Vevey and often visited Helen and Kurt Wolff in Locarno. Weakened by heart disease and no longer able to bear the stress of independent publishing, Kurt had moved his and Helen’s base to Locarno, expecting to make a full retirement. But William Jovanovich, at Harcourt Brace, lured them back with an offer so attractive that they could not refuse. He suggested they become his co-publishers, retaining both the name and the prestige of their imprint and protected by the financial resources of a large concern. Happy to resume his beloved work, Kurt once again traveled throughout Europe, reestablishing old contacts, meeting new authors, and bringing manuscripts to Helen to have translated and edited for the American and European markets. Totally engaged, Kurt seemed rejuvenated.7
On the afternoon of October 21, 1963, after their usual stop at the Bookfair in Frankfurt, Kurt and Helen took a detour through Marbach to visit the National Museum on their way to a meeting of Gruppe 47, a coterie of German-language poets, essayists, novelists, and dramatists who grappled with the social issues of Europe. Just seven kilometers from their destination, they stopped at a hotel in the small town of Ludwigsburg, and Kurt decided to take a walk. As he crossed a street, a tanker truck pulled into reverse. In his attempt to outrun it, Kurt was pinned by the force of its thrust. He died three hours later of massive internal injuries.8 Those who knew him called his action thoughtless and impulsive, yet somehow consonant with his character. He died taking one more chance, believing his instincts would carry him through.
Helen received the news alone at the hotel. Three days later, surrounded by publishers and authors from all over the world, Helen buried Kurt in Marbach, home of the German Literary Archives, the largest collection of literature in Europe. His colleagues hailed him as “the most distinguished literary publisher of the twentieth century.”9
To Anne, his sudden death must have seemed a familiar blow. Like the kidnapping of Charlie, the unexpected death of her father, and the disappearance of Saint-Exupéry, this death catapulted Anne from the lull of an ordinary day into the horror of loss. The man who had been a friend and a collaborator, who had loved her with “a purity” and a fullness of heart she had rarely known, was suddenly gone. As with Saint-Exupéry, when Anne wrote, she wrote for him. And once again, she had not had the chance to say good-bye.
The week before Christmas 1963, Anne Jr. married Julien Feydy, a young student she had met in Paris the year before. As usual, information was withheld from the press. It was a quiet service in the town hall of Dordogne, where the groom’s father, a university professor, owned a large manor house and estate.10 Within the week, Anne and Charles returned from France with Helen Wolff to spend Christmas in Darien.
On Christmas day, Charles declared that “everything will be the same.”11 Helen would edit, Anne would write, and he would ease their way. But as he watched the women grieve for Kurt, he must have wondered whether he could fill his place. Once again Anne’s grief had taken her to a place where Charles could not follow, and he must have known how she had changed. To Anne, heroism was no longer a physical act; it was a journey toward enlightenment and awareness. Anne’s magnificent “cathedral” of a husband, in spite of his noble intentions, was incapable of responding to her intellectual or emotional needs.
Nevertheless, in February 1964, Anne accompanied Charles to East Africa. She had long been a passive listener to his stories about a place that stirred him as nothing had since his early days of flying. Her visit did indeed convince her of Africa’s beauty—but she contracted viral pneumonia and had to remain in bed most of the spring.
By fall, Anne was hard at work again, reading and editing her letters and diaries. It was a project she had begun with Kurt, and now she was carrying it through, with the help of Helen. She wanted to shape a dramatic narrative, smooth enough for publication. Quite sure that she would never write another novel, she hoped that the story of her youth would be more compelling than any fiction she might imagine.
The bout with viral pneumonia in the spring of 1965 had left Anne physically exhausted, but it was an exhaustion she seemed eager to cultivate in order to free herself from Charles’s schedule.12 Nonetheless, Anne agreed again to accompany Charles to Africa during the Christmas holiday. Inspired, perhaps, by her memories of the trips with Charles in their “golden days,” she invited the children to join them. The safari would be a family expedition. Land refused to travel with his father, but Jon and his wife, Barbara, Anne Jr. and Julien, Scott, and Reeve traveled with Anne and Charles, without guides or guns through the “big-game lands” of Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Kilimanjaro, Olduvai, Amboseli, and Ngorongoro. Charles assumed his usual military stance, commanding his family as if they were troops on a battlefield. In fact, nothing had changed since their honeymoon. Charles held the maps, decided their course, orchestrated the folding and unfolding of their gear, and delegated responsibilities according to what he saw as their collective needs. “This isn’t a democracy,” he was fond of saying; “this is a beneficent dictatorship.”13
While Anne cooked their meals by campfire in the 120–degree heat, Charles went off scouting with the local game wardens. Feeling deserted by Charles, one day, in the Chumba Valley, Anne and the children staged an all-out mutiny, packing up the Range-Rovers so that they could head off for cooler and more temperate terrain. Charles returned and demanded that they unpack. Persuaded by Jon to obey, the children and Anne did as they were ordered.14
Though the family reunion was a failure, it was invaluable for Anne. On October 21, 1965, coincidentally the second anniversary of Kurt’s death, Anne published “Immersion in Life” as the cover story of Life magazine. It was one of Anne’s old-time travel pieces, reminiscent of North to the Orient and Listen, The Wind: a physical journey as a moral adventure, an exploration of the connections between man and nature and man and God. Writing in the first person, with the “innocence” of a child’s eye, Anne piles image on image, wrapping the reader in sight, sound, and smell until he is enfolded in the landscape. It is a musical piece, as thunderous and dissonant as the Dearly Beloved fugue, but dominated by a sweeping, harmonizing melody. It is confident and commanding as never before, modulated and precisely controlled, strong in detail, yet lyrical in language. Like all her narratives, it is a disguised sermon, filled with the demands of her Calvinist ancestry. But it is also the exercise of literary imagination in the comprehension of God’s will. It is the sanctification of literature as prayer.
On a trip to Paris in 1966, Charles took his usual place in the back of the plane, hiding behind his books and papers. But his long legs, thrust sideways between the seats, needed a stretch, and he walked down the aisle toward the back galley. Adrienne Arnett, a twenty-five-year-old stewardess who had seen him many times before, brushed by in the opposite direction. She was an attractive young woman, blond, buxom, and blue-eyed, distinctive in her jingling laugh and her direct, unabashed manner. Against company rules, Adrienne broke the silence.15
“You make me suspicious,” she blurted out. To her surprise, Charles was not offended. He wheeled around, eager to banter, delving, in a teasing way, her apparent curiosity. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she told him that he was a man of “special destiny.” It was no accident that he had flown the Atlantic, she said. His gifts were akin to those of all extraordinary men, no different from Thomas Jefferson’s or Benjamin Franklin’s. Intent on proving that she was more than she appeared to be, she told him that she was a metaphysician with a deep interest
in the spiritual aspects of life. Before he left the plane, Charles asked for her address and handed her a copy of “Civilization and Progress.” There was a book he wanted to send her, he said: Lao-tzu’s The Way of Life. It was a new translation of the book Anne had given him twenty years earlier.
For six years, Charles gave Adrienne many books—poetry, philosophy, even the works of Saint-Exupéry—and continued to see her in New York and Paris, London, Hawaii, California, whenever and wherever they happened to be. To Adrienne, he was “a gorgeous hunk of a man,” with piercing blue eyes and a fascinating mind. She was eager to follow his thoughts, to learn what he had to teach.
Adrienne made life disarmingly simple. She cared about his comfort and understood his needs. And he could talk to her, he said, as he could never talk to Anne. Demanding of him no commitment, allowing him to come and go as he pleased, she was content to live in the moment. When they were together, they talked and laughed, sharing easy pleasures—a long walk, a good meal, and perhaps more passion than they cared to admit.
When Charles was with Adrienne, his anger dissipated; he was boyish. And though he was sometimes distant and preoccupied, he was a gentle and attentive friend and companion, much as he had been when he courted Anne. But most of all, Adrienne was not afraid of Charles. When his teasing became abusive or he got out of hand, she did not hesitate to throw him out. He would call the next morning, sheepish and apologetic and strangely grateful. If Charles was the hero with a “special” destiny, he was also a boy with lessons to learn who had found, perhaps for the first time, a female mentor strong enough and willing to teach him.
Anne knew nothing of Charles’s visits with Adrienne.16 Slipped into the seams of his scheduled flights, the relationship was invisible except to Charles and Adrienne. But Anne did notice the “emptiness” of the hours. Feeling old and tired and not needed by anyone,17 she sought, as she had so many times before, to make sense of her marriage. Deeper than ever, she plunged into her diaries, hoping to find the “patterns” of their lives.
By the end of 1963, Anne and Charles had moved into a small house on the eastern side of their Darien property, built closer to sea level, “tucked among the marsh grasses with the shore birds of the Long Island Sound.”18 Unlike the rambling Tudor in which their family had grown, the house, designed by Charles, was spartan and symmetrical, with stucco walls and teal-blue shutters. Gone were the dark, cavernous rooms, replaced by light-filled spaces and a simple, muted, streamlined décor. The only remnant of Anne’s childhood was her father’s desk from Next Day Hill, piled high with papers and books. They called the house Tellina, the name of a mollusk with a small, delicate body and spindly, powerful legs; it was as if it reflected the new shape of their lives.
By the end of the decade, Charles had become a strong advocate of wildlife preservation and a recipient of several national awards. As he had done in his early pit-stop flights, he canvassed the United States, meeting local leaders and speaking for his cause. Under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, he shifted his attention to the South Pacific, surveying the land and animal populations, lobbying foreign leaders to pass legislation on behalf of conservation.
In 1967, on one of his flights home from the Philippines, Charles stopped to visit a friend, Sam Pryor, at his ocean-front estate on the eastern shore of Maui, in Hawaii. Sam’s uncle had been the president of the St. Louis bank that backed Charles in his 1927 flight, and he had known Sam since his early days at Pan Am. A man who could deftly handle the press, Sam had been “Trippe’s man on the Hill,” his liaison with government officials. He was a gregarious, hard-driving, salt-of-the-earth man in spite of his wealth, and he was given to hero-worship.19 Charles understood Sam, and they enjoyed their shared commitment to the land and animals, as well as a spontaneous “little boy” sense of adventure. Sam was among the few who could match Charles’s physical endurance and thirst for exploration. They had cultivated their relationship through the years, first at Pan Am, then as anti-Roosevelt men before the war, and also as neighbors in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In 1963, Sam and his wife, Tay, had purchased a hundred acres in Kipahulu, eleven miles outside the town of Hana. Their estate was a garden and a sanctuary, filled with flowers, shrubs, and trees, and home to Sam’s menagerie of pet gibbons.
From the moment Charles’s plane skimmed the surface of the island, he was taken by the line and color of its beauty. Its mountains sloped down to flat horizons, lush green terrain, and deep-dimpled craters of volcanic ash. Orange cliffs descended to black beaches washed by the deep blue sea. At early dawn, Charles would stand on Sam’s beach to watch the sun rise. He would swim beyond the surf to the coral reefs, among the waving fronds and the brilliantly colored fish. But to his disappointment, the primitive ways of the native people had almost disappeared. European culture had eroded Hawaii’s Polynesian past, and it had succumbed to the “modern.”
Nonetheless, Charles believed it a perfect home base, developed and populated enough for Anne, yet accessible to him in his conservation work both east and west. In 1968, he had a house built on five acres of ocean-front land, transferred to his ownership through the generosity of Sam. The house was designed to buffet the ocean wind and rain, and its geometric lines married simplicity with technological precision. As if Charles wanted to touch the primitive within the refuge of impenetrable walls, he had the house constructed of three-foot-thick stone, its surfaces covered with granite tile. Built without Anne’s consent, according to Charles’s needs, the house, appropriately named Argonauta, never felt like home to Anne. It was cold and unforgiving, without the comfort of heat or electricity. Forced to cook and write by gaslight, eleven miles out of town, and thousands of miles away from family and friends, Anne was almost always alone. She used to stand on the cliffs above the shore and hold her ears against the deafening roar.
Preferring the sound of cowbells and the softness of mountain mist, Anne often retreated to her chalet in Switzerland. While Charles surveyed the rainforests of the Philippines, Anne sat in Vevey on her verandah, watching the cloud-hung mountains in the distance and working on her diaries and letters. Helen Wolff, in Locarno, read her manuscripts line by line. Since Kurt’s death, Anne and Helen had become intimate friends; Anne trusted her literary instincts and her judgment. Her goal, Helen wrote to Anne, was to retain the honesty of her view while maintaining her professional objectivity. There was to be no record of marital disputes, children’s problems, or family disharmony. In a sense, Helen, with the consent of Anne and Charles, created the “Anne” of her published diaries. Through Helen’s eyes, Anne would become an asexual idealized woman, constantly struggling with herself for integrity. The flesh and blood Anne, with her rage and sensuality, would hover like a phantom beneath the text.
While Anne supported Charles in his land and wildlife conservation both in Maui and in Darien, she had no desire to follow him to the Philippines. Her jet lag, since the bout of viral pneumonia several years earlier, was growing more difficult, and “storms” of stomach pain would overwhelm her. Since Charles’s first visit with President Ferdinand Marcos, in 1969, his goal had been to preserve the “core forests” from devastation and development by European loggers. Convinced that the islands would be reduced to a wasteland, he asked Marcos and his ministers to pass protective legislation. Emmanuel Elizalde, Marcos’s minister of minority rights, a wealthy, Harvard-educated dilettante and playboy, was immediately intrigued by Charles’s efforts. Hoping to use Charles’s celebrity to advance his political ambitions, he granted Charles access to the interior jungles. After a survey flight of the islands in 1970, on which he was accompanied by New York Times reporter Alden Whitman,20 Charles and a group of hand-picked journalists, photographers, and anthropologists, were air-lifted to the rainforests of Mindanao, at the southernmost tip of the Philippines. There he would live among a lost and isolated Paleolithic tribe discovered by Elizalde several months before.
As the helicopter hovered, Charles dropped to the jungle f
loor, greeted by an orchid-leaf-clad member of the Tasaday tribe.21 After being guided six-hundred feet up to the stream-rippled mountain of this Stone Age, cave-dwelling society, Charles spent eleven days living and observing them. Convinced that they were pure specimens of “primitive man,” he returned to Manila to consult with Marcos.22
Within days of Charles’s return to Darien, Marcos had enacted legislation that transferred ownership of fifty thousand acres to the twenty-five-member Tasaday tribe. Refusing to heed the experts who thought Elizalde’s discovery a political hoax, Charles reveled in his victory. But after the November elections in the Philippines, and the decline of Elizalde’s political fortune, it became clear to Charles that the passionate exponent was less than honest. For the next fifteen years, martial law thwarted the efforts of scholars to study the Tasaday tribe. In the 1980s, however, it became clear that they were modern-day forest dwellers who, having been bribed by Elizalde with guns, clothes, and golf carts, had masqueraded for the international press. Later seen in jeans and T-shirts, cavorting around Elizalde’s Manila estate, they were understood to be pawns of his ambitions.23 Once again, Charles was duped by smooth-talking politicians eager to harness his popularity to their ends. The Stone Age tribesmen were hired actors, and the Paleolithic tribe did not exist.