Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Lindbergh insisted upon a national meteorological system, starting with weather stations placed at regular intervals along the TAT route. “On departure from each airport,” Lindbergh wrote in one of his first statements for the company, “planes would be given a complete report of weather conditions then existing along their route and also a prediction of conditions which would exist at any time during the flight.” In some cities that meant a trainmaster stepping outside and looking up at the sky. Soon every station along the TAT line was equipped with a complete weather station, and they were all linked. The company contracted with the Radio Corporation of America to put ground stations and pilots in direct communication with each other and arranged with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to install private teletype service between each of the stations along the way.

  TAT prepared to offer forty-eight-hour transcontinental trips in the summer of 1929; and Lindbergh was already anticipating that they might shave twelve hours off that by the time they opened for business. While each of those first planes in the TAT fleet would be able to fly twelve passengers at 105 miles per hour, Lindbergh was inspecting designs for other planes with capacities of thirty-two passengers and speeds up to 130 miles per hour and was foreseeing trips across the continent taking less than twenty-four hours!

  Handsomely rewarded—$10,000 a year for chairing the Technical Committee plus a signing bonus of $250,000, with which he could purchase forthwith twenty-five thousand shares of company stock at ten dollars per share—Lindbergh worked hard for his piece of this new industry. He suggested Ford might also manufacture aluminum chairs and a toilet in each of the planes TAT was buying from him; he met with the Acme Milling and Refining Company about new ores and alloys that might be used in planes; he talked to General Electric about producing lights for landing fields and magneto compasses; he recommended that Goodyear manufacture tires especially for desert landings, which would be impervious to mesquite, cactus, and sandburs; he designed a special navigational watch with rotating dials, which A. Wittnauer company produced for him and subsequently sold to the trade.

  Lindbergh also granted TAT restricted use of his name in its publicity. After public relations representative Harry Bruno parenthetically referred to the company in a publicity story as “The Lindbergh Line,” he consented to its further use as the company motto. With the publicity came greater responsibility, for Lindbergh knew that any major accident on “his” line “might well be compared with the sinking of the Titanic.”

  That spring Lindbergh forged a business relationship with another early mogul of the aviation industry, Juan Terry Trippe. Not of Hispanic origin, as was often assumed—but named for an Aunt Juanita—this enterprising son of a New York banker grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, graduated from Yale in 1920, and served in the War as a Navy flying instructor. With backing from a few of his wealthy schoolmates, including a Whitney and a Vanderbilt, he formed Eastern Air Transport. Two years later he bought two small competing airlines, Pan American, Inc., and Florida Airways, which he merged into Pan American Airways—all before he was thirty. Alternately described as a pioneer and a pirate, Trippe secured the airmail contract between the United States and Cuba. With its rum and gambling, Havana became a favorite vacation hideaway for Prohibition-parched Americans, which Pan American exploited by establishing daily passenger service from Key West.

  While their motives differed, Juan Trippe shared Charles Lindbergh’s global visions for aviation. During his five days in Havana on his Caribbean tour, Lindbergh had spent time with Trippe and inspected his base of operation there. He even flew passengers for him, testing one of the new Pan American Fokkers. Both men agreed that after transcontinental routes and before transoceanic routes, it was necessary to span the Americas. More than anybody Lindbergh had met, Trippe had the passion and the power to make that happen. Within months of his TAT deal, Lindbergh also became Technical Adviser to Pan American Airways—again for a salary of $10,000 a year plus the right to purchase about one-tenth of the company’s shares at half their present value. Lindbergh would remain active with the company for more than forty years.

  Lindbergh was not merely corporate window dressing. As adviser to two airlines, he took to flying where nobody had before him, selecting and surveying routes. He often tested new planes, determining which were best for his companies to purchase. He set down specifications for Pan American planes from the Sikorsky S-40 amphibian in the early days of flying boats all the way through the Boeing 747 of the jet age. In his earliest discussions with Trippe, Lindbergh considered such projects as: dirigibles for transoceanic routes; floating runways, to be anchored at three-hundred-mile intervals across the Atlantic; buoys with rotating beacons for night flying, to be anchored along the Caribbean route; catapult takeoffs for heavily loaded transoceanic planes; refueling in flight to allow for transoceanic range; microfilming airmail letters to reduce their weight. As Pan Am’s needs differed from TAT’s, there was still a debate between wood or metal construction. In but a matter of years, Lindbergh felt Henry Ford had been right and ordered all-metal monoplanes for the entire Pan Am fleet.

  While Lindbergh never cashed in on the $5,000,000 he was offered to endorse products and to appear in movies, within eighteen months of his famous flight, he had earned more than $1,000,000. Lindbergh also received fees up to $10,000 a year for advising the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Daniel Guggenheim Fund; six-figure royalty checks continued to come his way from “We,” as did five-figure checks from The New York Times for his internationally syndicated articles. J. P. Morgan & Company looked after his investments, two-thirds of which were in stocks, mostly blue chips along with companies with which he felt a personal connection, such as the Guggenheims’ Kennecott Copper, Curtiss Flying Service, and a new builder of airplanes, Boeing. Some have suggested that such financial sharpies as Keys and Trippe taught Lindbergh how to avoid income tax; but tax rates were low and Lindbergh’s returns were always scrupulously simple. Compiling his own data, which was vetted by officers of Bankers Trust and Morgan, as well as Colonel Breckinridge, he declared all his income and deducted only the most obvious business expenses. Living nowhere on next to nothing, by age twenty-six, Lindbergh had enough of a nest egg never to have to think about earning money again.

  He also saw that his mother, then fifty-two, would be financially secure for the rest of her life. Although Charles started sending her $3,000 semiannually, Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh continued to teach in Detroit. She saw no reason to change the way she lived. At the same time, numerous offers came her way, opportunities to write articles and make personal appearances. In the summer of 1928, Constantinople Woman’s College offered her an appointment as a visiting professor of Chemistry. Besides the chance to travel through Europe and Asia, Evangeline viewed the job as a way of both teaching and investing in “international good will.” She accepted, recruiting as a companion Alice Morrow, whom she had befriended at Christmas in Mexico City. Dwight Morrow’s unmarried older sister had been a teacher in Pittsburgh, and the college was pleased to engage her as its official hostess for the winter semester. The two women sailed together in early September, arriving in Turkey fifteen days later.

  Not until his mother was seventy-five hundred miles away did Lindbergh approach what he had targeted as his primary obligation that year—marrying and starting a family. By his own admission, America’s most eligible bachelor “had never been enough interested in any girl to ask her to go on a date.” As a barnstormer, he had resisted the sexual promiscuity that came easily to aviators, finding fly-by-night relationships with women “facile,” offering “little chance for selectivity, hardly any desire for permanence and children.” In the Army there had been a shanty village near the flying field where prostitutes were available, but Lindbergh never crossed its borders. He later wrote that he thought it “was not an environment conducive to evolutionary progress.” His intellectualizing aside, Lindbergh also admitted fifty years later that he had simply been sh
y and inexperienced and did not want to contend with the problems that attended women—“you had to learn to dance, to talk their language, to escort them properly to restaurants and theaters.”

  Lindbergh never got over his schoolboy nervousness. Toward the end of his life, he would write at length about the genetic makeup he had sought in a mate, starting with the obvious—“good health, good form, good sight and hearing.” The specifics descended from there into a discourse that was more about animal husbandry than human relations. He thought he was displaying a dry wit in emoting less about choosing a wife than a farmer might in selecting a cow. In truth, he never did grow comfortable enough to describe the only courtship in his life. “It’s not that he was cold,” remarked one of Anne Morrow’s friends from her first days visiting Mexico; “he was just immature.”

  Lindbergh was at a distinct disadvantage in dating. “Girls were everywhere,” Lindbergh wrote objectively of his popularity, “but it was hard to get to know them.” His singular fame created an unnatural air of “awe, respect, and curiosity.” To make matters worse for somebody so inexperienced, the press monitored his every move, ready to turn an innocent glance into an international headline. Reporters trailed him when he began calling on the Morrows that year.

  While Anne was still at Smith, he visited Englewood, where her mother and sister Elisabeth were inspecting the construction of their new house. They arranged for Lindbergh to visit the family at the summerhouse they were building at Deacon Brown’s Point on North Haven. During a subsequent phone conversation with Lindbergh, Mrs. Morrow referred to her daughter and Lindbergh asked, “Which daughter?” Elisabeth was taken aback that Lindbergh knew—as she wrote Anne—“there was more than me.” The press was already conjecturing a summer romance between Elisabeth and Lindbergh.

  So was Anne. “I don’t think I can bear to face it,” she wrote in her diary, imagining Lindbergh’s visit: “He will come. He will turn quite naturally to E., whom he likes and feels at ease with. I will back out more and more, feeling in the way, stupid, useless, and (in the bottom of my vain heart) hoping that perhaps there is a mistake and that I will be missed.” Her thoughts festered into mild hysteria.

  With graduation approaching, Anne became consumed with two dreams, the first largely to keep her mind off the second: she wanted desperately to win the Jordan Prize, awarded for the most original work of prose or verse; and she prayed that Colonel Lindbergh might take some interest in her—that “he liked me.” To protect herself from being hurt, she prepared a line of attack against even allowing herself the latter fancy. “Fool, fool, fool,” she wrote. “You are completely and irretrievably opposed to him. You have nothing in common. You don’t even sincerely care a damn for his world. You are just swept away by the force of his personality.”

  Her first dream came true, and then some. At graduation, Anne received not only the Jordan Prize but another for the best essay on women of the eighteenth century. What was more, she had a poem published in Scribner’s. Those triumphs behind her, she could return to fretting about the imminent visit of Lindbergh, as the Morrows set up housekeeping in their new large white summer place, which had cost more than $100,000.

  Just as Anne’s anxiety over Lindbergh’s arrival reached fevered pitch, a rainy front descended upon the coast of Maine, preventing him from getting through. Anne felt relieved, until she learned that Colonel Lindbergh changed his flight plan to go to New York. “Elisabeth of course again,” she wrote. “It was like that sudden falling down you have in a dream—kaplunk.” Anne and Constance spent summer nights discussing Elisabeth’s inevitable wedding to Lindbergh. Newspapers reported that their engagement was imminent.

  In the fall of 1928, Lindbergh telephoned the Morrow house in Englewood, the first time he had ever called a girl for a date. But he was calling Anne, not Elisabeth. She was not there, and Mrs. Morrow’s secretary, Jo Graeme, told him to telephone the following morning. Refusing to believe that Lindbergh actually wanted her, Anne anxiously grabbed the telephone when he called back. He was just as nervous as she, blurting, “Hello—Miss Anne Morrow—this is Lindbergh himself.” Then he charged forward with an obviously prepared statement about a promise he had made to take her flying. After a conversation that threatened to break off with each sentence, they agreed to see each other the following week.

  A few days later, Lindbergh arrived for a meeting to “settle a few points” about their date. “Well,” he explained, thinking of the press, “we can’t go to any of the fields or we’d be engaged the next day. I’ve been engaged to two girls in one week and I haven’t seen either of them.” He laughed and blushed, and so did she. Anne later admitted that she had forgotten how tall and good-looking he was.

  On October sixteenth, they met in the New York apartment of friends of the Morrows. Anne had thrown together a motley outfit, riding trousers of Constance’s, a woolen shirt of her mother’s, and thick gray golf stockings of her father’s; she wore her own street hat and high-heeled shoes and red leather coat. “Gosh,” Anne later wrote, “what a mess I looked.” He drove her in his new, black Franklin sedan out to Port Washington, where he had arranged with Harry Guggenheim to use one of his horse pastures as a landing field. On the way out, the awkwardness of their conversation lifted, and she discovered that she could be “perfectly natural with him, say anything to him,” that she “wasn’t a bit afraid of him or even worshipful any more.” Upon arriving at Falaise she felt even closer, seeing how “at home” he was in the splendid surroundings and how comfortable he made her feel.

  Toward the end of lunch, Lindbergh excused himself to go to Roosevelt Field, where he had rented a De Havilland Moth. Harry and Carol Guggenheim filled Anne with tales of “Slim” and his practical jokes, then took her out to the field, where Lindbergh landed in the small, open-cockpit biplane. He helped her into a parachute and gave her a quick lesson in the controls. Minutes later, they were in the air, high enough to view both coasts of Long Island at once. “I can’t describe the flying,” Anne later wrote Constance, “—it was too glorious.” By the time Anne had returned to New York City she believed “Colonel L. is the kindest man alive and approachable.” Before they parted, he suggested another flight, perhaps down the New Jersey coast.

  Later in the week, Anne and Jo Graeme met him at Teterboro Airport, near Paterson. A reporter was already at Lindbergh’s heels asking, “What general direction are you headed?” Lindbergh replied, “Up”; and Anne stifled a giggle. Then he flew his two passengers over the islands of New York City, as far south as Lakehurst, while the setting October sun bathed the entire city in golden light.

  By the time Anne and her chaperone had returned to Englewood, reporters were calling and had even staked out the house. A newspaper in Mexico had surmised that the Morrow daughter seen flying with Lindbergh was Elisabeth. Even worse, Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow had clumsily addressed the mistake instead of ignoring it, telling the Embassy staff, “It wasn’t Elisabeth, it was Anne—isn’t it funny?”

  The “joke” even got laughs overseas. Elisabeth Morrow had come down with bronchial pneumonia while traveling abroad and was recuperating in the Mayfair residence of Edward Grenfell, the English partner of the Morgan Bank. “Were you the person I read about in the London paper which said, ‘Young, pretty, sparkling, vivacious girl flies with Lone Eagle—resembles Miss Elisabeth Morrow’?” Elisabeth inquired of her younger sister. “Mrs. Grenfell showed it to me and we both roared.”

  Anne was humiliated, cheered only when Lindbergh visited again that night and got her joking about the press reports. After supper, he took Anne for a drive in his Franklin through a dense fog. For hours they talked, covering a wide range of topics, from politics to his image in the press. He spoke of aviation in a way that made Anne understand that he saw it as but a means to greater ends. “The thing that interests me now,” Lindbergh said to her, “is breaking up the prejudices between nations, linking them up through aviation.”

  When Anne lowered her gu
ard and told him that she hoped to write, he seemed to understand her passion. He even volunteered that he wished he could write. Repeatedly dumbfounded by the sensitivity of his comments, Anne was finding their silences as comfortable as their conversation. By the time they had returned to Palisade Avenue, she felt completely safe with him. She wrote up the entire evening in her diary and in letters to Constance, all except two salient details: Charles Lindbergh asked her to marry him; and she consented. They agreed not to tell anybody until he had addressed her parents in person.

  Lindbergh had fallen in love with Anne Morrow. The evidence of his feelings overwhelmed all the practical considerations he had detailed in his autobiography. The attraction between him and Anne was so strong that he completely overlooked the Morrow family’s physical and mental health problems, which he once would have considered obstacles.

  Anne was leaving that week for Mexico City, and Charles wondered how he might join her without drawing attention to his trip. By chance, the American military attaché in Mexico invited Lindbergh on a hunting expedition in the northern plains of Coahuila, and Ambassador Morrow asked him to stay at the Embassy afterward. Stopping in St. Louis to vote (for Herbert Hoover), Charles arrived in Mexico City on Friday, November ninth. After dinner that night, Anne and Charles and a young embassy employee went to a dance at the home of Eman Beck, a longtime resident of Mexico City, whose daughter Susanna was becoming one of Anne’s closest friends. For once, Anne enjoyed herself, clutching her secret as she watched the adoring women flit around her fiancé.