The next day, Dwight and Betty Morrow took Anne and Lindbergh to the weekend house they had just bought in Cuernavaca, fifty miles south. The Ambassador and Lindbergh talked agriculture all the way down, mostly about cows. The Morrows’ sprawling place—which they cleverly named “Casa Mañana”—was enchanting, with red tiled terraces and roofs, tropically planted courtyards, and a swimming pool. Sunday morning, sitting alone with Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow, Charles announced his intentions.
“I think that I can never be surprised again,” Betty Morrow would write in her diary later that night. “I am stunned.” Upon hearing the news, she rushed to find her daughter and enjoyed a few minutes alone with her in their mirador, a third-floor tower that overlooked all of Cuernavaca. “Anne,” she said, mustering all her best wishes, “you’ll have the sky!—the sky!” At the same time, she saw that her daughter was “all trembling and upset—& very fearful of herself.”
“I think she loves him,” Betty Morrow added in her diary. But she had doubts. Anne and Charles had only met four times since Christmas; and they seemed to have come from two different worlds. Before going to sleep that night, Betty checked on her daughter only to find Anne sitting on the side of her bed. “Oh, Mother,” she said, “I am so happy.”
Lindbergh remained in Mexico with the Morrows for two weeks, as they all tried to get used to the startling news. The Ambassador, who had until that time been nothing less than worshipful, was heard grumbling more than once, “What do we know about this young man?” He urged the young lovers to take some time to get acquainted. Lindbergh had no doubts about the marriage, but he agreed to postpone an announcement as long as possible because he feared the avalanche of publicity.
“He is utterly utterly different from me,” Anne kept telling her mother, “but it’s all right.” By the end of the fortnight, Betty was not completely convinced, though she was sure that Anne was. “I don’t believe that she will change,” Mrs. Morrow wrote. “I think she is thoroughly in love with Lindbergh. She understands that they are very different—she sees clearly that. There are some things she is going to lose—but he is a romantic figure & a fine virile man who has conquered her imagination. I can’t imagine it—but I must.” Anne and Charles spoke of a private wedding in North Haven. But until they knew exactly when that would be, they wanted to release no word of the engagement. Lindbergh suggested that the resumption of their separate lives—he returning to his aviation work, she remaining with her family in Mexico—would throw the press completely off their scent.
Until their announcement, Charles insisted that nobody must know, except the few people to whom he and Anne would reveal the news themselves. The Morrows’ diplomatic skills were put to the ultimate test that very week when they withheld the news from their daughter Elisabeth, just returning from Europe and being met at the docks by hordes of reporters asking about her engagement to Colonel Lindbergh!
Charles informed his mother in Constantinople by mail in two short sentences. “When you are happy,” she wrote back, “I am satisfied, for you deserve the greatest happiness life has to offer. You have been too fine always in your attitude toward me for me to be able even to write about it.”
Anne and Charles remained apart for most of the next three months, bonded by their great secret and growing affection for each other. Through letters, discreet telephone calls, and coded telegrams, Lindbergh carried on his first romantic relationship. Despite the separation, he felt her love.
The feeling was mutual. “The sheer fact of finding myself loved was unbelievable and changed my world, my feeling about life and myself,” Anne would write forty-five years later. “The man I was to marry believed in me and what I could do, and consequently I found I could do more than I realized, even in that mysterious outer world that fascinated me but seemed unattainable. He opened the door to ‘real life’ and although it frightened me, it also beckoned. I had to go.”
While she spent the autumn between Mexico and Englewood, Anne revealed her secret to a few friends. “I don’t expect to be happy,” she confessed to former beau Corliss Lamont, “but it’s gotten beyond that, somehow.” Instead, she hoped he would wish her “courage and strength and a sense of humor.”
In December 1928, the Morrows’ big, new Georgian house was completed, which they called Next Day Hill. Exuding stately grace, the white-painted brick house with stone trim lorded over more than seventy-five acres. In the end, it cost $400,000, complete with morning room, formal library, and a pine living room transported from an old great house in England. Another quarter-million dollars was spent on the furniture and landscaping. The backyard included a dozen vast flower beds, an old apple orchard, and profusions of Betty Morrow’s favorite flowers, columbines and larkspur. On New Year’s Eve, between four and seven, the Morrows hosted their first party at Next Day Hill, a housewarming attended by nearly one thousand people. The buzz that evening was that Lindbergh might appear and that his engagement to Elisabeth might be announced.
By February, the press was closing in on the truth. Finally, at four o’clock on the twelfth—while Anne was in Mexico City and Charles was in the air between the cities of Belize and Havana, carrying the first airmail between the two American continents—a beaming Ambassador Morrow invited the newspaper correspondents into his Embassy office. When they had all assembled, he leaned over his desk and handed each reporter a small slip of paper on which was typewritten: “Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow announce the engagement of their daughter, Anne Spencer Morrow, to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.” When pressed for details, Morrow said only, “In matters like this, one guess is as good as another.” When reporters caught up with Lindbergh, he evasively added, “Well, then, you know all about it. I have nothing to say.”
Within two hours, a friend called the Morrows from Englewood to say the news had been broadcast over the radio. Over the next few weeks, the Embassy received thousands of letters and presents from statesmen and strangers alike. Most of the messages were congratulatory, though millions of hearts around the world were broken. One young girl wrote that she did not really think Anne was pretty enough. Lindbergh’s name was everywhere again, in bold type—“‘WE’ NOW A TRIO.” The entire nation rejoiced anew over this crowning touch to the two-year celebration of the Lone Eagle’s triumph. Six Ziegfeld Girls offered to serve as bridesmaids.
Anne Morrow had remained so veiled from the public eye that many newspapers around the world mistakenly published a picture of Lindbergh sitting with the parents of his fiancée and Constance. “Unlike most brides-to-be,” Anne later remarked, “it was I who was congratulated, not he.” One member of the Embassy merrily sang, “She was only an ambassador’s daughter, but he was Prince of the air.” Anne thought of him less as a prince than a “knight in shining armor,” and she as his attendant. “The role of page came naturally to me,” Anne later realized. She did not think that role was a good basis for a marriage, but she thought it was good for her own development—“a role I could play until I grew up.” Until then, she could continue to live in somebody else’s shadow.
Her sister Elisabeth seemed genuinely happy just being a “bridesmaid.” “It is the most perfect and beautiful thing that ever happened,” she had written her mother when she learned the news, two weeks before the public announcement. “Of course there will be times when she will have hard and difficult situations to face but they will make her stronger and more capable of living fully. She will always be protected and loved by her husband.” And at Milton Academy, Constance Morrow had tapped her water glass at dinner the night before the news hit the papers to make the announcement to her schoolmates in Hathaway House. There was tremendous applause and shrieks of surprise. At the next school social, she was stunned to find herself so popular, cut in on every dance. Dwight Jr. had recently entered Amherst, but his mental health once again forced him to drop out of school, this time for treatment with Dr. Austen Fox Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; but he was excited when told that he would be able
to attend the wedding.
While the engagement was a feather in the caps of the Ambassador and his wife, they remained properly concerned about their daughter’s welfare. “Poor child!” Betty noted. “With all the world congratulating her, she is having many hard moments.” Within days, Charles had joined Anne in Mexico, and she felt suffused with “faith and courage” every time she looked at him. As he gave her nerve, she gave him heart.
Later that week Charles and Anne stole away from the Embassy, flying from Valbuena Field for a private picnic alone on a prairie. Taking off again after their lunch, Lindbergh looked outside the Travel Air cabin monoplane he had borrowed and saw one of its wheels rolling along the ground. To make matters worse, the plane had no safety belts. Charles explained the problem to Anne, but not the possible repercussions. He said that they would fly around for hours, reducing both the load of gasoline and the danger of explosion on impact. He padded Anne with the two seat cushions and instructed her to open the windows so they could crawl out if the plane tipped over. At last, they circled the field, where a frantic crowd had gathered, signaling not to land—as though they had an option. Charles and Anne looked at each other and laughed. Then he began his approach, coming down slowly. With one hand he controlled the plane; with the other he braced himself, grabbing a tube of the fuselage structure. He brought the plane down on one wheel, keeping the opposite axle balanced high for thirty yards before it gouged the ground and the plane turned turtle. Anne suffered but one moment of silent panic, wondering how she would appear in his eyes if she could not face this test. But by the time she realized what had happened, she had crawled out the window and was perfectly fine. He had dislocated his shoulder.
“Anne very cool & composed through it all,” her mother observed, “& he is awfully proud of her. I should think he would be!” Although he had a good excuse not to, the next evening Charles insisted on appearing with Anne at a large diplomatic dinner at the Embassy—with his arm in a sling, rigged to a colorful scarf tied around his waist. Terrifying though the plane crash had been, Betty Morrow could not help noticing how the shared experience drew Anne and Charles closer together. “I believe a beautiful thrilling life is ahead of them,” she wrote an old friend, “—if only the papers will let them alone after they are married.”
Within ten days, Lindbergh left to pilot the inaugural flight between Mexico City and Brownsville, Texas, for Pan American Airways. He spent most of March traveling on airline business, while Anne remained in Mexico, out of sight. By then, there was no doubt in her mind that she was making the right decision, but she found it difficult making one adjustment in particular. Her “intensely private” husband was determined to “keep intact this most private of all relationships”; and toward that end, he had warned his fiancée, “Never say anything you wouldn’t want shouted from the housetops, and never write anything you would mind seeing on the front page of a newspaper.” Anne believed “an experience was not finished until it was written or shared in conversation”; and, as a result, she kept no thought unexpressed either in diaries or any of a dozen active correspondences all her life. She believed this “lid of caution … clapped down on all spontaneous expression” would be the most difficult adjustment she would have to make.
Lindbergh, of course, had grown accustomed to the ubiquity of reporters and false stories. But it hurt him now to see Anne and her family turned into innocent victims of this cat-and-mouse game, having their privacy invaded. Reporters camped outside the gates of Next Day Hill, and photographers hid in the woods around Deacon Brown’s Point, North Haven. Morrow servants were regularly offered money for information about the young couple; and the Hearst syndicate even bribed a workman to steal a cache of Anne’s letters. Whenever Anne and Charles went driving, they were followed. Charles and Anne instinctively learned to confine themselves to the private estates of family and friends.
Newspapers reported presumptions about the Lindbergh wedding, its guest list growing each week. The media assumed a June wedding in North Haven and a honeymoon by airplane. Because the press had standing cash offers with workers at most airports for any word of Lindbergh’s flying activities, Lindbergh secretly placed an order with an officer of the Elco Company for a boat, a thirty-eight-foot motor cruiser. Then, the third week of May, he ordered his Curtiss Falcon flown to Rochester with instructions to leave it in a hangar fully serviced. As Lindbergh suspected, the press migrated to Roosevelt Field and northern New York, keeping their eyes peeled for a large gathering of Morrows and other dignitaries. They showed no special interest in Dwight Morrow’s returning to New Jersey on the last Sunday of the month for a birthday party for his wife.
Although the secret was kept from even the few who had been invited for tea the next day, Monday, May 27, 1929, was chosen for Anne and Charles’s wedding. She walked through most of the morning in a daze, picking lilies of the valley and tulips in the backyard to decorate the house. Later, with her mother, sisters, and childhood friend Vernon Munroe, Anne went to the old house on Palisade Avenue, where they cut forget-me-nots and cream columbine and a few sprays of light blue larkspur. Elisabeth arranged the flowers into a bridal bouquet. Charles and his mother arrived from New York together, joining Anne’s grandmother and two maternal aunts and the rest of the Morrows for lunch. Anne was too nervous to eat.
Mid-afternoon, Charles excused himself to the library, where he spent a few minutes making a two-and-one-half-page holographic will. In the event of his death he wished to create a trust fund of $200,000 for his mother, and he bequeathed the remainder of his estate to Anne. He also suggested that she select any items she wished from the exhibit of his belongings at the Jefferson Memorial in St. Louis, the rest to be left to the historical society for a permanent exhibit. The will was primarily for Evangeline Lindbergh’s protection, as Anne’s own trust fund was then worth a half million dollars.
The other guests arrived around four, driving past an indifferent coterie of reporters. A hush hung over the house, creating a funereal mood, or so joked Elisabeth. There was a handful of people from Dwight Morrow’s side and another few of Betty Morrow’s dearest friends. Dwight Jr. was, in fact, too ill to leave the sanitarium in Massachusetts. Charles had only his mother. Then Reverend Dr. William Adams Brown of the Union Theological Seminary appeared, and it was clear that a wedding ceremony was about to occur. They were twenty-two present in all, the bridal couple included.
Anne readied herself in the ladies’ dressing room downstairs. She wore a simple gown of cream-white chiffon—made by the local dressmaker who had sewn clothes for the Morrow daughters since they had been children—and blue heeled slippers. A maid helped Anne with the French lace veil, which fell to her shoulders. Charles, in his blue suit, came into the room, shut the door, and went over to reassure her. At that moment, Anne later recorded, “I knew it would be all right.” Then her father, mother, and sisters entered. Each of the women kissed her, before proceeding to the large living room, hidden from the street and overlooking the gardens.
Dwight Morrow smiled at Anne, “very gently & happily,” and offered his arm. Together they walked before the hushed group facing the fireplace. In an instant Reverend Brown recited an abbreviated service. Anne and Charles quietly answered his ritual questions, and he slipped the ring on her finger. (It was made from gold nuggets that had been presented to him in Honduras.) Afterward, people approached to kiss her. There were no photographs.
Everybody walked out to the enclosed piazza for refreshments. There was a large fruitcake by Madame Blanche of New York City. It had been made weeks earlier, with a frosting that had become rock-hard. Nobody had read the special instructions from Madame Blanche, saying that a knife had to be dipped in boiling water before attempting each slice. As it was, Charles sawed away at this nearly impenetrable block.
In the middle of everybody’s joy, Betty Morrow experienced a moment of terror. As she whispered to Charles that she would get a sharper knife, he grabbed her by the wrist and growled
“No! No!” in a tone she had never heard before and would never forget. He managed to hack through the cake, and pieces were passed around.
Anne quietly went upstairs to change into a French blue suit and a blue felt hat. Her mother and sisters followed to say good-bye. At 4:30, everybody waved as the newlyweds slipped out the back of the house and into a car. Charles and Anne drove past the entourage of newsmen waiting at the bottom of the hill, just as they had many times when they went for a drive. The press corps pursued them, but the newlyweds gave them the slip, driving down a blind alley in which Henry Breckinridge was waiting in Lindbergh’s Franklin. They exchanged cars. Donning caps and dark glasses, Charles and Anne started their long drive to Long Island. They stopped once to jot and post notes to Betty Morrow. “I do not believe it would be possible to have even wished for a more perfect occasion,” Charles wrote his mother-in-law.
The guests lingered at Next Day Hill until 6:45. Not until then had a word about the wedding been released. On his way home, one of the Morrows’ friends spoke to the reporters at the bottom of the drive and let the cat out of the bag. By seven o’clock it was on the radio. A few minutes later, Dwight Morrow’s secretary, Arthur Springer, distributed to the newsmen the official announcement, one sentence in length; he took no questions. That same afternoon, the Daily News carried an article announcing that Lindbergh would be marrying soon, before an assembly of fifteen hundred.
With their two-hour jump on the press, Charles and Anne reached their destination on the Sound at ten o’clock, undetected. According to plan, they found a dinghy tied to a tree, which they hauled by flashlight to the water. As a cold wind blew, Charles rowed his bride out to their cruiser, the Mouette, which waited there with lights shining, beckoning them to begin their voyage together.
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