Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  There was, once again, talk of drafting Lindbergh to run for political office. He could not have been less interested, though politics still concerned him deeply. The night before the 1952 elections, in which General Dwight Eisenhower was expected to walk off with the Presidency, Anne Lindbergh gave her husband copies of several speeches by Ike’s opponent. Lindbergh was so impressed with what he read that he cast his ballot for Adlai Stevenson, the first Presidential vote he had ever cast for a Democrat.

  While Lindbergh refused most interviews, he did agree in 1949 to speak with Richard Davis of Newsweek after learning that the writer was favorably predisposed toward him. Davis’s “Special Report” ran three pages, the bulk of which detailed Lindbergh’s war record. That same year, Lindbergh corresponded with Wayne S. Cole, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, who was writing a history of the America First Committee. Cole would write several books on the subject, including one a quarter-century later entitled Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II, which took no sides in discussing the debate but which fully aired Lindbergh’s views.

  Lindbergh also accepted two of aviation’s most prestigious awards. The first was the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy, which he received in 1949 at the Annual Wright Dinner at the Aero Club of Washington. He used the occasion to speak about man’s need to “balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind—qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.” In this lyrical address, he applauded the pioneer spirit of the men they were actually celebrating that night: “The Wright brothers,” he said, “balanced success with modesty; science, with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk, their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance. And from that balance came wings to lift a world.”

  The other prize was the Daniel Guggenheim Medal, awarded to Lindbergh for “pioneering achievement in flight and air navigation” at the Honors Night Dinner of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in New York on January 25, 1954. Lindbergh doubly appreciated the gold medal—first because he admired Daniel Guggenheim’s crucial support of early aviation and rocketry, and second because it was presented by Harry Guggenheim, who was able to demonstrate that their recent political differences had not destroyed their “fast friendship.” Again Lindbergh harped on the themes of materialism in the modern age. “Short-term survival may depend on the knowledge of nuclear physicists and the performance of supersonic aircraft,” he said in accepting the medal, “but long-term survival depends alone on the character of man.”

  Weeks later, Lindbergh was notified of an even more startling honor. Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott had recently been considering ways of ensuring his own place in history, of being “remembered by the American people.” His chief of Information Services, Colonel Robert Lee Scott, Jr., suggested, “Sir, it’s very simple. There’s a great man who made the greatest single flight that’s ever been made in this world…. He became a Colonel in the reserves and they hadn’t taken him any higher because he offended President Roosevelt when he came back and told the truth about what the Nazis had ready in the Luftwaffe…. All you gotta do,” Scott said of Lindbergh, “is make him a General.” The awarding of such rank required Presidential nomination and Senate approval. Eisenhower seemed only too pleased to announce the appointment; and with even former enemies in the press supporting it, the Senate followed suit. On April 7, 1954, in a private ceremony in his Washington office, Secretary Talbott swore him in as a Brigadier General.

  Later that year, Lindbergh added even more to his prestige when he completed another book. “I have been working a little each day lately on an outline of an autobiography which I hope someday to complete,” Lindbergh had noted in his journals back in January 1939, when he and his family had been living in Paris. “We,” his own hastily composed rendition of his 1927 flight, had never sat right with him; and Lindbergh had been determined ever since to “create a record that was as accurate” as he could make it “without the pressure of time.” In every spare moment across the next decade—aboard transatlantic ships, on commuter trains, in a tent in the New Guinea jungles, in a bomber returning from the North Magnetic Pole, on an air base in Arabia, in a trailer on the Florida Keys, in the Carrels’ house on Saint-Gildas—he crafted the manuscript. He wrote at least six complete drafts of the story, which opened with the historic flight’s moment of conception—while flying the airmail in the skies south of Peoria—and closed with his tumultuous arrival—sitting on the ground at Le Bourget and seeing “the entire field ahead … covered with running figures!”

  Parts of the book were rewritten as many as ten times. In the penultimate draft, the manuscript took its most dramatic turn, as the author transposed 260,000 words of memoir in the past tense into a pulsing narrative in the present indicative. Even two dozen sequences that preceded the central story of the memoir and which were scattered throughout—his Minnesota and Washington boyhood, his army and barnstorming experiences—were recast as flashbacks in the new tense.

  Not until the 1950s did Lindbergh show a word of the manuscript to anyone. Anne was the first to read it, and her criticisms were of “tremendous help.” Reminding him to maintain his own style by “remaining in character,” she indicated his occasional lapses into overwriting. “Your style,” she told her husband, “is clipped—short sentences, precise—not careless…. Imagine you are speaking to me, not writing at all.” By the fall of 1951, Anne was putting in countless hours of her own editing the manuscript.

  Pleased with the way they published Of Flight and Life, Lindbergh submitted The Spirit of St. Louis to Scribner’s. While he had agreed to a lower royalty than usual on the former book, he did not hesitate to ask for a higher percentage than usual on this surefire bestseller. “I know that during the early period of sales, advertising costs are a major item for the publisher,” he wrote young Charles Scribner, who had recently succeeded his father as head of the company. “But if sales are high,” he noted, as was the case with the Lindberghs’ other books about flying, “it is due in part to the reputation of the author entirely aside from money spent by the publisher in advertising. Here, I think that the author has a right to a share in the indirect results of his previous accomplishments.” Lindbergh sportily agreed to a $25,000 advance and a fifteen percent royalty from the first copy sold, all proceeds of the book being entered into a trust for his children, with Anne serving as trustee. He knew it was less than he could have received on the open market.

  Lindbergh’s editor, John Hall Wheelock, was extremely enthusiastic about the manuscript, even more moved after a second reading—“not only by the way you have unfolded your story,” he wrote the author, “but by the extraordinary beauty of the descriptions of sea and air, of cloud and sky. That passage through canyons of storm, fighting off sleep and death, haunted by voices out of some super-sensory world, is conveyed with the immediacy of reality itself.” He responded to Lindbergh’s request for “severe” criticism by recommending “fairly drastic cutting.” Over the next two months, the author excised seventy pages, mostly from the flashbacks, which Wheelock felt distracted from the central story. Lindbergh did, however, reject Wheelock’s suggestion to omit both a brief afterword that chronicled the rest of the events that occurred on the night of his arrival, and a comprehensive appendix comprised of the log of the Spirit of St. Louis’s subsequent flights and all the engineering data related to the plane’s construction.

  By the end of 1952, Lindbergh had engaged a literary agent, George T. Bye, to negotiate the first serialization and motion-picture rights to the book. With little effort, Bye procured a whopping $100,000 from The Saturday Evening Post, which condensed and serialized the work in ten installments under the title “33 Hours to Paris.” The Lindbergh articles generated the largest sales in the magazine’s history, selling out the expanded printings in most cities
within two days—gathering almost two hundred thousand readers a week more than usual. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose The Spirit of St. Louis as its main selection for September 1953. And some of the biggest names in Hollywood began bidding for the film rights—Howard Hughes, King Vidor, Hal Wallis, George Stevens, and a hotshot young writer-producer-director named Sidney Sheldon. Samuel Goldwyn wined and dined the Lindberghs, then suddenly withdrew from the competition, never revealing why. In fact, his friend Arthur Sulzberger had warned him that negative press would probably surround the project because of Lindbergh’s purported anti-Semitism.

  In the few months before publication, Anne and Charles toiled over the galley proofs. “He was the most fussy of authors, living or dead,” recalled Charles Scribner. “He would measure the difference between a semicolon and a colon to make sure each was what it ought to be. To him, every detail in the book has as much significance as if it were a moving part in his airplane.” Despite all the tinkering, the book never lost its magic.

  Up to the end, Anne found she could not read it “without feeling a rush of tears to my eyes and throat.” She asked herself why that should be and concluded, “There is something in the directness—simplicity—innocence of that boy arriving after that terrific flight—completely unaware of the world interest—the wild crowds below. The rush of the crowds to the plane is symbolic of life rushing at him—a new life—new responsibilities—he was completely unaware of & unprepared for. I feel for him—mingled excitement & apprehension—a little what one feels when a child is born & you look at his fresh untouched … little face & know he will meet joy—but sorrow too—struggle—pain—frustration.” Just before publication, Lindbergh dedicated the book: “To A.M.L.—Who will never realize how much of this book she has written.”

  Scribner’s wrapped the six hundred pages in a dark-blue jacket that depicted a starry night sky. The book also included maps, fifteen photographs, and endpapers which had been reproduced from an original aquatint by Burnell Poole entitled “The Epic of the Air.” It depicted a mountainous range of ocean waves beneath a forbidding sky, in the midst of which one could discern the familiar lines of Lindbergh’s little plane, appearing as little more than a speck.

  The Spirit of St. Louis became an overwhelming bestseller and received only favorable reviews everywhere. By the end of the year, the Book-of-the-Month Club alone had sold one hundred thousand copies. Dominating sales lists everywhere, it sold another several hundred thousand copies in its first twelve months on sale. “A great ovation,” Anne noted in her journals. While she had feared brickbats in the way of personal attacks thrown at him, he received only bouquets. “In consequence,” she added, “there is a wave of excitement about him again.”

  The Lindberghs enjoyed their happiest Christmas in years. Charles’s resurrection led to an “expansiveness” that Anne could hardly recall. The following spring, he received another unexpected feather in his already well-plumed cap. The Trustees of Columbia University informed General Lindbergh that he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Another wave of congratulations ensued.

  “Boom days are here again,” a jubilant Anne wrote in her diary. “The Great Man—the Great Epic—the Great Author etc. etc. I am living in the aura of 1929 again. Only I am different….”

  17

  DOUBLE SUNRISE

  “I first heard the term ‘double sunrise’ during World War II, when

  I was on islands of the South Pacific…. While the sun is still below the

  horizon, clouds color in both east and west. If you are not certain of

  your directions, you sometimes have to look carefully to be sure

  whether the sun is going to rise on your right hand or your left.”

  —C.A.L. (in a letter) December 17, 1968

  “JEALOUSY,” ANNE HAD ONCE WRITTEN IN HER DIARIES, “is the unlived life in you crying out to be spent.”

  Four months after The Spirit of St. Louis took off, she confided to her private pages, “I envy C. his terrific drive though often I suffer the consequences of it. That terrific drive which he applies without discrimination to crossing the Atlantic, writing a book … or finding out the price of butter!”

  Charles’s winning the Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1954 gnawed at her. She felt he deserved the award and that she should have joined him in his happiness. And yet, she confessed, “it inevitably caused me pain”—mostly because “I helped him write the book. I helped it to be that perfect. I know it never would have been that perfect without my help.”

  Anne found even more painful the likening of her husband’s work to that of Saint-Exupéry. She could not bear to see her French idol diminished, not even by her husband. “The motivation of one was love, understanding, insight, compassion for human beings,” she wrote of the Frenchman. “The motivation of the other is conquest—success—achievement. Both the act itself and the writing about the act—was an act of conquest over the impossible. This is noble, this is courageous, heroic, exciting, also very beautiful, worthy of praise, fame—success. But it is not everything.”

  And yet, Anne had to admit, Charles had written “HIS book”—“And this is His book no matter how much of me is in it—it is his book. He has put all of himself into it. Personality—emotions—thought—hours of work. He has written HIS book & I have never written mine. I know this.” For that she blamed only herself—“my cowardice—my inhibitions—my laziness—my lack of centeredness & sureness—my unhappiness & gropings—that have kept me from writing it.” After almost ten years of dabbling, Anne admitted to herself that she was not sure “her” book would ever be written. She was smarting too much to realize that most of it had, in fact, been put down on paper—in her diaries and letters and chapters she had abandoned over the years. She had only to stop struggling with the idea of writing it so that she could at last pull it all together.

  Ever since Jim Newton had exposed the Lindberghs to Florida’s west coast, Anne made a point of getting there every year during the final weeks of winter, often alone. As early as March 1948, on the unspoiled island of Captiva, she had begun to let her mind wander, collecting imagery. Shells, especially, captured her attention, as she began to see how each variety was a different kind of dwelling and could symbolize a different phase of life. Staying in a shabby, rambling house of an inn, she wrote Charles that she felt like a hermit crab, leading an extremely simple life in this “deserted shell.” She said she also realized that the Florida beach “is not the place to work.”

  That phrase would become the opening of her book, a group of essays she began to compose in 1950 in order to “think out” her own “particular pattern of living,” her own “individual balance of life, work and human relationships.” She was calling her collection The Shells, each piece composed of observations drawn from a different shell. As she tentatively shared the first pieces with intimate friends and family, she realized that these discussions she was having with herself on paper spoke to other women, “young and old, with different lives and experiences—those who supported themselves, those who wished careers, those who were hard-working housewives and mothers, and those with more ease.” Anne gradually discovered “that many women, and men, too, were grappling with essentially the same questions as I, and were hungry to discuss and argue and hammer out possible answers. Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me, to evolve another rhythm with more creatives pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.”

  Anne got especially involved writing about a shell that had been given to her, that of a double-sunrise—a delicate bivalve, each side of which “is marked with the same pattern; translucent white, except for three rosy rays that fan out from the golden hinge binding the two together.” It made Anne think about relationships and how each half gets drawn apart into its more specialized and functional role. Considering all the angst she h
ad endured in her own marriage, she wondered if the two increasingly disparate halves could ever be rejoined—“can the pure relationship of the sunrise shell be refound once it has become obscured?”

  She got a chance to answer her own question in March 1951, during a marital rough patch, when Charles and Anne accepted an invitation together from John and Adelaide Marquand to visit them at their winter getaway, Treasure Island, four miles out to sea from Nassau. With a new war brewing in Korea, Marquand enticed Charles with the many advantages of the house they had rented: “There is no telephone,” he boasted, “and there is no radio, except one that belongs to the … help. There are no electric lights and no power gadgets. The rudimentary plumbing is supplied by rain water pumped by hand into the tanks. There are two good bathing beaches, and the reefs on the northern part of the island are excellent for spear fishing. We also have a boat with a motor, so we are not entirely out of touch from everything.” Also staying in the sprawling Great House on the private, narrow island would be Ellen Barry and Dr. Dana Atchley.

  It was one of the most important weeks in Anne’s life, one which validated much of her recent work on The Shells. It also allowed Anne to observe her husband alongside her new physician friend and to draw comparisons. While Atchley had both a probing mind and a compassionate soul, Anne could not help agreeing with Charles that he was “the perfect example of the intellectual who has neglected the life of the body!” Meantime Anne watched Treasure Island bring out the boy in Charles, as he spent long sunny days in the water. “I have rarely seen C. as happy, as free—as released—as gay with people as this week,” Anne observed. At night, he held his own, talking science with Atchley and books with Marquand—even though the host did find “the Lone Eagle pretty tough to converse with as he does not understand the light approach to anything.” The Lindberghs took long walks together and sat alone under the stars; and seeing his “bronzed body in his tan shorts … on the brilliant white beach—with a long sword on his belt almost the length of his shorts—& a spear in his other hand”—reconnected her to the feelings for the shy golden boy with whom she had first fallen in love. Anne realized that relationships are in constant flux; but she could at last write with surety, “The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”