Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Charles and Anne imposed a news blackout for as long as possible. Because neither telephone nor telegraph operators were above accepting bribes—indeed, Lindbergh heard of a new standing offer of $2,000 for any “secrets of the household”—Charles devised a coded message to wire his mother when the baby arrived: “Advise purchasing property” if it was a boy; “advise accepting terms of contract” if it was a girl. Charles would send the message using the name of an outlaw ancestor, Reuben Lloyd.

  Next Day Hill practically became a sanitarium, what with doctors also checking on Dwight Jr. and on Elisabeth, who, in the excitement of opening The Little School, had suffered a mild heart attack. A delivery room and nursery were set up for Anne, and Charles stepped up his search for a homesite, now focusing on New Jersey.

  “PURCHASING PROPERTY,” “Reuben Lloyd” wired Evangeline Lindbergh on June 22, 1930, Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday. A nurse and three doctors had attended the birth. Charles stood by his wife during the entire eleven-hour labor, holding one of her hands while Betty Morrow held the other. When the pain became too excruciating for her to bear, the anesthetist put her completely under. For Charles’s sake, Anne was happy to have delivered a son, even though he said the sex of the infant did not matter to him. When she first saw the healthy seven-pound, six-ounce newborn, she thought, “Oh dear, it’s going to look like me—dark hair and a nose all over its face.” Then she recognized Charles’s mouth and the “unmistakable” cleft in the chin and happily fell asleep.

  Lindbergh and his in-laws argued about releasing the news. Betty Morrow was able to wrest permission only to inform the household staff, so long as she did not reveal the baby’s gender. After the diplomatic Dwight Morrow persuaded him to present the barest formal statement, Lindbergh dashed off a short script for Arthur Springer, Morrow’s secretary, to read to the wire services. “Mr. Springer calling from the home of Ambassador Morrow,” he was instructed to say. “A son was born today to Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh. This is for your information. Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh are issuing no announcement.”

  Telegrams and letters and flowers and presents and poems and songs poured in from all over the world—mostly from complete strangers. Parents Magazine sent the Lindberghs a free subscription; the director of the Florentine Choir of Italy composed a lullaby; chambers of commerce across the country sent silver cups and brushes. A Boston company printed special cards for the occasion—“Congratulations to the Happy Lindberghs”—hundreds of which arrived at Next Day Hill. Headlines referred to the infant as “Wee Lindy,” “Baby Lindy,” or simply “Eaglet.” Countless editorial cartoons portrayed a baby eagle in flight with the stork. Numerologists and astrologers made public predictions, one pronouncing him a genius, another asserting, “The Lindbergh heir will earn a name for himself, through his own ability.”

  Desperate for information and a picture of the baby, the press knew how to smoke out the reluctant parents. Stories appeared that the baby was deformed or, worse, had been stillborn. Everybody walked around Next Day Hill in a state of anxiety, suspecting everybody else of selling out to the newspapers.

  At last, Lindbergh called a formal press conference in New York. He barred five newspapers, including Hearst’s, because of their “contemptible” journalistic practices. He called upon a policeman to eject one reporter from the room before he proceeded to give details about the baby—whose name, he announced, was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. When asked what career he might choose for his son, Lindbergh replied, “I don’t want him to be anything or do anything that he himself has no taste or aptitude for. I believe that everybody should have complete freedom in the choice of his life’s work. One thing I do hope for him, and that is when he is old enough to go to school there will be no reporters dogging his footsteps.”

  Lindbergh distributed a photograph of his son that he had taken himself. He told the “constructive press” to copyright the prints and asked them not to give them to the five newspapers he had excluded. Within a day, every newspaper in the world had a copy of the picture, including the five on the blacklist—one of which stole it from the Associated Press. When a journalist reported this fact to Lindbergh, he replied that that did not matter to him so much as the point that he had not cooperated with them. “My stand,” he said, “is a matter of principle.”

  For the first time since he had become famous, Lindbergh received negative press. The masses still worshiped him. Indeed, New York’s Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently asked for an autographed picture of him, St. Louis wanted to erect a statue in his honor, and there were already whisperings of drafting him to run for President (even though he was Constitutionally underage). And the birth of his son uncapped a geyser of people with the best of intentions who also hoped to cash in on the Lindbergh name: an unemployed candymaker in Boston wanted permission to produce “Lindy Jr. Pure Honey Kisses”; the Magyar Evangelical Reformed Christian Church of Gary, Indiana, named their new church the Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. Cathedral Chapel; and the stream of requests for interviews for articles and books had hardly abated since his flight. But now many members of the press who felt they had helped create this hero felt unfairly dismissed by him.

  That summer The New Yorker suggested that for all Lindbergh’s posturing on behalf of aviation, he had not contributed a single new idea other than his observation that the one light that penetrated fog was blue. “His technical advice to the companies which pay him bank president’s salaries,” wrote a columnist out of Toronto, “has been negligible…. He has cashed in on the name of Charles Lindbergh and the almost imbecile adoration of the American public.” Although Lindbergh claimed the occasional spattering of mud onto people awaiting him on runways was the unintentional result of trying to avoid running into them, journalists were noting that it was happening all too often. Some spoke of his “violent temper.” The writer from Toronto asked, “Does Lindbergh really dislike publicity, or does he realize that the best way to get it is to pretend that it is objectionable to him?”

  Feeling the strains of the Depression, many did not think the Lindbergh baby should be afforded any special attention. Letters to newspaper editors reflected this shifting attitude of the shattered economy. “How much longer do your readers have to look at pictures of the Lindbergh family?” wrote a reader signed “Disgusted” to one newspaper. “It isn’t enough to shove Lindbergh in every day, but now his baby has to cover the front page.” Another reader concurred: “… the kid is no better than a longshoreman’s, and perhaps not as good as some.” Letters to the Lindberghs also reflected the hard times. What had once been requests for autographs became appeals for money. More than two hundred new parents asked for the baby’s outgrown clothes.

  That summer, Lindbergh found 425 acres for sale ten miles north of Princeton, New Jersey, in the Sourland Mountains. Supposedly so named because there was so little lime in the ground, this ridge of the Sourlands ran the intercounty line, separating the majority of the property in Hunterdon County from the front yard in Mercer County. Five hundred feet above sea level and one of the highest points in the state, the hill had its own brook, a few open fields, and woods of old oaks. This pocket of New Jersey was “practically inaccessible except by air,” reported one wire service, and difficult even for locals to find. The town of Hopewell was less than three miles away; other than that, the area was uninhabited, except for a few poor farmers. Within weeks, the Lindberghs had bought the parcel, and he had ordered a quarter of the land to be cleared and leveled for a landing field. They engaged Chester Aldrich, the architect of Next Day Hill, to draw plans for a house.

  As it would be another year before it would be erected, the Lindberghs rented an old farmhouse on ninety acres between their new property and Princeton. New York City was an hour away by train, two hours by car. White with green shutters, the three-story, eight-room house sat behind a white picket fence on Rosedale Road. It came furnished and had a field large enough to land the blue-winged Bird biplane in which Charles was st
ill teaching Anne to fly. A butler, cook, and baby nurse moved in with them; but they ate their meals “farm-fashion,” not served, just as Charles had as a boy. “Our own home—imagine it!” Anne exuberantly wrote her mother-in-law.

  Anne settled into motherhood, though she did not feel that the motions came to her naturally. She read the latest books on child-rearing, which for all their modern theories of psychology still maintained a Victorian attitude against the display of affection. Lindbergh seemed too frightened of the baby to have any physical contact with him. By the end of the year, the child’s hair was growing in curly and golden, and he took to lifting his arms to be picked up. Lindbergh at last gave in to taking him “ceiling flying,” which would make “Little Charlie” laugh. The Lindberghs continued to go out almost every night, leaving the baby in servants’ care. Charles seldom set foot in the nursery.

  In February 1931, the Lindberghs hired a new baby nurse, Betty Gow, right off the boat from Scotland. She had heard about the position from another Scot, who worked at Next Day Hill. Betty was Anne’s age, intelligent, and seemed responsible; and she moved in, along with Elsie and Aloysius “Olly” Whateley, the English couple. Anne’s only concern about her staff was their inexperience with the press. “They have none of them been over here very long,” she wrote Charles’s mother, “and so are not so familiar with many U.S.A. customs. The baby is not quite in the same position as most other babies. I am thinking of the emergency situations that arise out of publicity. The house is rather unprotected. The baby sleeps outside. Unless he is watched every second, anyone could walk in and photograph him etc.”

  Anne worried that her family’s movements could be followed by anybody who read a newspaper. Her sister Constance had already been the target of a failed kidnapping attempt at school; an insane woman had already come to their door insisting on seeing the baby as a matter of “life or death”; and another had been sending obscene letters before postal authorities arrested her in New York. Persistent rumors of the Lindberghs crashing somewhere put photographers on the alert at all times to capture the first picture of the “maybe orphan.” Before spring, the foundation of their new, more private residence was being dug. Charles spent many afternoons chopping down trees around where the house would be built.

  Until its completion, Anne felt most comfortable at Next Day Hill. But even there, legions of curiosity-seekers invaded their privacy. One day, a carload of sightseers sped into the front court, and, in haste, hit Anne’s West Highland white terrier, Daffin, then screeched off, leaving the howling dog to die.

  MORE THAN THE PRESSURES of fame—the omnipresence of the media and the masses—drove Lindbergh to more interior pursuits. Indirectly, his marriage had as much to do with his shifting aviation, as he put it, “from a primary to a secondary interest”—as he embarked on an intellectual journey into the realm of biology. In fact, Lindbergh had considered becoming a doctor in his youth, in the tradition of Lodges and Lands. “But,” Lindbergh later wrote, “I was told that in carrying on his profession, a doctor had to be able to read and write Latin. My first contact with high-school Latin convinced me that the requirements of medicine lay beyond my intellectual desires and capacities.” Still, Lindbergh used many of his flights to ask himself questions about the mysteries of life. If man could take to the skies, Lindbergh mused, why could he not remain on earth forever?

  In 1928, he had become interested enough in biology to purchase several textbooks. “I decided then,” he later recalled, “to reduce my activities in aviation sufficiently to permit the devotion of a reasonable amount of time to biological studies.” In 1929, he bought a good microscope and thought about setting up a laboratory if he ever settled down. Once married, he could not help paying attention to his sister-in-law’s deteriorating health. He even obtained permission from Princeton’s president, John Grier Hibben, to visit the university’s laboratories in his search for answers.

  One day, Lindbergh asked Elisabeth’s doctor why an operation could not be performed to repair her damaged heart. The physician replied that the organ could not be stopped long enough for the surgery to be performed. Lindbergh asked why a mechanical pump could not circulate the blood during an operation and was “astounded” that an eminent doctor could not answer the question. “Knowing nothing about the surgical problems involved,” Lindbergh recalled, “it seemed to me it would be quite simple to design a mechanical pump capable of circulating blood through a body during the short period required for an operation.” The prospect of this “artificial heart” spawned a new series of questions: “Why could not a part of the body be kept alive indefinitely if a mechanical heart was attached to it—an arm, or even a head? … Why would not a mechanical heart be valuable for certain surgical operations?”

  Dr. Paluel Flagg, Anne’s anesthesiologist, could not answer Lindbergh’s questions either, but he said he knew a man at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research who could. On November 28, 1930, at the imposing complex of edifices built atop its own promontory between Avenue A (York Avenue) and the East River in the East Sixties, Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Flagg met the legendary Dr. Carrel, if not the Institute’s most brilliant figure, certainly its most controversial.

  Alexis Carrel was born in Lyons in 1873. The grandson of a linen merchant, he grew up learning the fine points of stitchery. Graduating from the local university at seventeen, he entered medical school there and proved himself unusually gifted, mentally and manually. He practiced sewing with a needle and thread on paper until he was able to make stitches that would not show on either side. In his twenties, he published his first paper on vascular surgery, a radical treatise at the time. He often espoused mystical views, which further alienated him from the scientific community. Temperamental and energetic, the small surgeon with penetrating eyes emigrated to Montreal, where he published a controversial paper on anastomosis (joining) of blood vessels. In 1905 he transplanted a puppy’s kidney to the carotid and jugular of an adult dog and watched the kidney function for several hours.

  Carrel’s work attracted the attention of America’s medical community, including Simon Flexner, the founding director of the Rockefeller Institute. This brilliant Jew from Louisville, Kentucky, who had little formal education, understood the importance of so unorthodox a mind as Carrel’s to a facility interested in making quantum leaps in medical research. Carrel joined the Institute in 1906, becoming one of the new main building’s first occupants. Designing his own very sharp, curved needle, and coating it as well as his thread with Vaseline, which rubbed off in the puncture holes, Carrel developed a new method of blood-vessel anastomosis which became standard operating procedure. For his work on the suturing of blood vessels and the transplantation of organs he became, in 1912, the first surgeon to receive the Nobel Prize.

  A devout Roman Catholic, Carrel addressed each scientific problem from both the outside and from within, serving as metaphysician as much as physician. With his holistic approach, he linked the particles of the cosmos with the soul of man, always considering the balance between heredity and environment in his quest for enriching mankind. “The human body is placed, in the scale of magnitudes, halfway between the atom and the stars,” Carrel would write. “Man is gigantic in comparison with an electron … when compared with a mountain … he is tiny.” Genetic defects and man’s adaptations to his environment fascinated him, leading him to spin numerous theories. One was the dangers to human beings of excessive light. “We must not forget,” he wrote by way of illustration, “that the most highly civilized races—the Scandinavians, for example—are white, and have lived for many generations in a country where the atmospheric luminosity is weak during a great part of the year. In France, the populations of the north are far superior to those of the Mediterranean shores.”

  His work in the laboratory was as bodacious as many of his statements. While studying the healing of wounds in Lyons, he had considered the possibility of restoring and reconstructing injured tissues—by removing the unhe
althy tissues, growing them successfully in a different medium, then substituting that new tissue for damaged tissue. Toward that end, on January 17, 1912, he removed a minute piece of heart muscle from an unhatched chicken embryo and placed it in fresh nutrient medium in a stoppered Pyrex flask of his design. He transferred the tissue every forty-eight hours, during which time it doubled in size and had to be trimmed before being moved to its new flask. Twenty years later, longer than the average lifetime of a chicken itself, the tissue was still growing. Every January seventeenth, the doctors and nurses at the Rockefeller Institute would celebrate with Carrel, singing “Happy Birthday” to the chicken tissue.

  In 1913, on a visit to France, Carrel married Anne de la Motte, widow of a marquis. She was said to be blessed with mystical powers, and theirs was a spiritual—and childless—union. The following year, as war broke out, Carrel enlisted in the French Army Medical Corps, becoming a major. With chemist Henry D. Dakin, he developed the Carrel-Dakin germicidal technique for bathing infected wounds, which earned him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. After the armistice, Carrel returned to the Rockefeller Institute, leaving his wife in France for months at a time. Through the twenties, his work advanced from the problems of culturing pieces of tissue to whole organs.

  Dr. Flagg could not have timed his introduction of Charles Lindbergh to Dr. Carrel any better. At one of the long tables in the Institute’s dining room, Flagg witnessed the instantaneous connection between the surgeon and the aviator, each of whom was favorably predisposed toward the other. Carrel believed in the psychological importance of heroes, for they played a role in “promoting the optimum growth of the fit.”