Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  In a subsequent essay, “The Reviewer’s Duty to Damn: A Letter to an Avalanche,” Ciardi explained that he had not written in anger. He simply felt that The Unicorn “was about to be taken seriously as poetry, whereas my conviction was that it had not taken itself seriously … as poetry.” Anne maintained public silence, letting her fans speak for her. She wrote one of them that she did not think much of the poems herself, and she thought they were “not worth his attack.” She was hurt not so much by what Ciardi said as “by his intention to hurt—to tear down, to destroy.” She believed he was actually attacking “the false overly sweet image of me in the public mind—a kind of ‘Whistler’s Mother,’ complete with lace cap—rocking chair—folded hands & smile of acceptance.” Anne hated that picture too. But, she had to accept, “the American public seem to like it & defend it to the teeth. Unfortunately he did not destroy it—only shellaced me more tightly in the frame.” Except for one verse in the following December’s Atlantic Monthly, Anne Morrow Lindbergh never published another poem.

  While this latest encounter with fame sent Anne scuttling back to the privacy of her home and diaries, Charles found himself the object of attention all over again, in CinemaScope no less. After several years in development, the motion-picture version of The Spirit of St. Louis was released.

  A Jewish émigré known for the sophistication, and often cynicism, of his films, Billy Wilder seemed an unlikely candidate to translate the innocent story of a Minnesota farmboy’s flight to Paris. But even though the writer-director had difficulty understanding Lindbergh’s earlier isolationism and his accepting a medal from the very country Wilder had fled, the “Lone Eagle” had remained one of his heroes since 1927. If nothing else, making a film whose primary action consisted of a man sitting alone in a cockpit for thirty-three hours presented a creative challenge. Impressed with the seriousness of Wilder’s work as a filmmaker, Lindbergh had sold the rights to him and his producing partner, Leland Hayward, for $200,000 plus ten percent of the gross from the first dollar of receipts. In Hollywood hyperbole, the press announced that Lindbergh had sold the rights for a million dollars.

  During the months he worked on the screenplay, Wilder frequently sent his subject letters full of questions, the specificity of which only reassured him that Wilder intended to produce as accurate a reenactment as possible. With that in mind, Lindbergh convinced Hayward and Wilder to hire his old barnstorming friend Bud Gurney, then flying DC-6’s for United, to serve as the film’s technical adviser. Gurney got to take a lucrative leave from his commercial flying, and Lindbergh had his oldest friend shepherding the filmmakers if ever they strayed too far from the truth.

  Knowing Wilder’s need for details, Lindbergh agreed to accompany him on a specially arranged visit to the Spirit of St. Louis at the Smithsonian. They flew together on a commercial flight, during which they encountered terrible turbulence. In their prior meetings, the generally voluble Wilder found Lindbergh so cold and dry that he restrained himself from dropping his fabled one-liners. But with the plane shaking so badly, he could not refrain from leaning over and saying, “Mr. Lindbergh, would it not be embarrassing if we crashed and the headlines said, ‘Lone Eagle and Jewish Friend in Plane Crash’?”

  Leland Hayward and his wife (like Lindbergh, known to her friends as “Slim”) joined them at the Smithsonian, where the museum had erected scaffolding, with a stairway up to a platform right alongside the Spirit. It was an eye-opening visit for the filmmakers to see how crude the plane was—with an instrument panel, Slim Hayward noticed, “about as complicated as the dashboard of a Model T Ford.” She got a peek at Lindbergh’s character when he stepped into the plane and noticed the engine fuel primer knob was pulled out. “This is not supposed to be in this position, it should be thrust in,” he muttered, as he gently pushed it.

  Back in California, adviser Gurney wrote Lindbergh that he had become most concerned as to whom should be cast in the lead. “I haven’t the remotest idea who should,” he confessed, “but I feel most strongly that whoever he is—he should be able to reflect to some extent, the way you impressed those who knew you at that time.” Gurney did not just mean tall and lanky but also decent and modest. Because it was the only role of any importance in the entire picture, it warranted a movie star. Closest to fulfilling all those qualifications was James Stewart, a decorated pilot and lifelong admirer of Lindbergh, who lobbied for the role. For all his qualities, however, casting Stewart forced the filmmakers to sacrifice one of the essential elements of the Lindbergh story—for no matter how effectively Hollywood’s makeup men worked their magic, nobody could disguise the fact that the twenty-five-year-old “Lone Eagle” was being portrayed by a forty-seven-year-old.

  The film’s only other serious deviation from the truth was a dramatic device of Wilder’s. Before he had met Lindbergh, Wilder had toyed with the idea of showing Lindbergh spending the night before his flight, as had been falsely rumored in 1927, with a waitress of easy virtue. It would provide the story with a love interest, thus allowing the audience to follow another character anticipating his return and giving Lindbergh someone to whom he could soliloquize during the flight. Realizing how untrue to character such an addition would be, Wilder dropped the idea. Still facing the problem of dramatizing a man alone in a plane, he decided to break the monotony as Lindbergh had in his book, by flashing back to earlier events in Lindbergh’s life which led to his flight. The rest, he decided, could be helped by a fly—an insect that stows away and buzzes around Lindbergh’s sandwiches—to which Lindbergh could speak during his journey.

  Wilder insisted the fly was dramatically necessary to carry Lindbergh from New York to Paris. But once filming began, Stewart found its falseness so irritating that he said either the fly left the picture or he did. Hayward said it was too expensive to reshoot the scenes already “in the can,” and so they struck a compromise: the fly could travel as far as Newfoundland. The rest of the shoot was fairly typical, plagued with bad weather and cost overruns. Building three replicas of Lindbergh’s plane and capturing the aerial footage that comprises much of the film amounted to more than $1,000,000 of the picture’s $6,000,000 budget.

  Although nobody involved was fully satisfied with the finished product, Warner Brothers pulled out all the stops in promoting the film. The studio threw a gala premiere at the Hollywood Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on April 11, 1957, and they released it across the country throughout the spring, hoping to capitalize on publicity for the thirtieth anniversary of the flight. In its extensive advertising and promotion, the studio struck a deal with Kellogg’s, which agreed to pack a three-inch replica of the Spirit into each of twenty million boxes of Rice Krispies. Standard Oil, Wright Aeronautical, Goodrich, Pioneer Instruments, and several other companies boosted the film with their own “tie-in” advertising.

  Most of it proved to be for naught. Jack Warner was reputed to have called The Spirit of St. Louis the “most disastrous failure” his studio ever had, and he could not figure out why. Much of the problem seemed to be that the phenomenon of Lindbergh had subsided. Beside the many who had grown indifferent or hostile toward him, baby-boomers were more interested in rocket ships and outer space than in some antique plane. Despite several striking vignettes, especially those capturing the moments before takeoff, the contained action of the drama could not offer the kind of widescreen thrills—or even an antagonist—that movie audiences had come to expect.

  And there was, it turned out, difficulty getting the film booked into several theaters because of Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic reputation. In fact, shortly before it was released, a Warner Brothers attorney contacted Lindbergh’s lawyer and suggested that the general don his Air Force uniform, fly to Israel, and officially review their troops. Lindbergh, of course, refrained from participating in any of the film’s promotion, including his appearance at the opening. He ignored the requests for him to speak at banquets, to grandmarshal parades, to reminisce on the radio, or to appear on television game shows.


  Trying to attract as little attention as possible, he and Anne and their three youngest children quietly slipped into Radio City one afternoon that March to see the film. Despite the few deviations from the truth for dramatic or comic effect, Lindbergh found it true to the spirit of his journey. The audience surrounding him that day was enthralled. And about halfway through the film, during one particularly tense moment in the flight, eleven-year-old Reeve clutched her mother’s arm and whispered, “He is going to get there, isn’t he?”

  While their father’s monumental flight was occasionally discussed at home, the equally famous subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping was strictly taboo. It pervaded the air they all breathed, but it was never remarked upon … until that day when each Lindbergh child would come home from school confused for having learned about a brother who was never discussed. “Father,” Ansy later related of her conversation, “took me aside, told me the story in just enough words to satisfy my curiosity, and never discussed it again. He made it very clear, however, that ‘they caught the right man.’”

  Every few years, the unmentionable topic surfaced within the family, as a young man claiming to be the long-lost “Lindbergh Baby” would write or simply appear in Scott’s Cove. The letters went unanswered; the impromptu visitors were not permitted entry into the house. Charles would quietly walk the pretenders back to their cars, the children not knowing exactly what he said as he sent them on their way. With such insanity always lingering just around the corner, the Lindbergh children were raised knowing more than not to talk to strangers. From the time they were old enough to travel alone, they were trained in the ways of traveling incognito—using assumed names, disclosing their itineraries only to those who had to know, never drawing attention to themselves. More than sixty years after the crime, the Lindbergh family continued to receive communiqués from “the Baby.”

  The five surviving Lindbergh children grew up practical but naïve, generous but cautious, industrious but self-critical. Each was nurtured to be uncommonly kind and polite; and each developed, by nature, a strong sense of privacy. They all inherited their mother’s sensitivity and their father’s vitality; the boys were quietly virile, the girls vigorously feminine. Growing up in a home with much love but little affection, the Lindbergh children saw a marriage so strong that it often excluded them. They were all encouraged at early ages to get on with their own lives, to leave the nest. Eager to achieve, they instinctively entered arenas that interested their father but in which they would not have to compete against him or his memory.

  Coming of age in the Lindbergh family meant subjection to a barrage of letters from the paterfamilias, lectures on everything from finance and sexuality to career and press relations. Although Jon left for Stanford University a skilled pilot, his passion since his youth at Illiec was the sea. Charles removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders by telling him, “I don’t believe I’d take up aviation as a career. Many of the elements which attracted me to flying no longer exist. Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art. The air was as full of adventure and the unknown as North America was a hundred years after Columbus…. I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.” In addition to his studies, Jon pursued mountain-climbing and skydiving, and joined the Naval Reserve. He seriously considered leaving Stanford after his second year, as his father had at Wisconsin; but Lindbergh reminded his son that his grades at Wisconsin had not left him any choice.

  Jon remained at Stanford but moved out of his dormitory and into a tent he pitched in the Coast Range foothills a few miles from campus. After completing his degree in Biology, he did postgraduate work at the University of California at La Jolla and spent three years as a “frogman”—an Ensign with the U. S. Navy Underwater Demolition Teams who worked with explosive charges. Three months before graduating, he married a schoolmate, Barbara Robbins, the daughter of a Chicago mining engineer. Charles and Anne were thrilled with his choice and even more elated the following year when they became grandparents.

  Shortly before the birth, Lindbergh offered an unsolicited opinion, that should the newborn be a boy it not be named Charles. “As you know,” he wrote, “your older brother was named Charles, Jr. The naming of your first boy ‘Charles’ would, without doubt, create undesirable and dangerous newspaper publicity connecting him with the tragedy of 1932—which was probably itself caused by excessive publicity.” The advice was not necessary. The young Lindberghs named the girl Christine. She was less than a month old before Charles had sent Jon a letter about setting up trust funds for his children.

  Land followed Jon to Stanford and spent his summers working on ranches—jobs his father arranged—one in British Columbia, another in Liberia. A hard worker, he always declined invitations for special sleeping and eating privileges so that he could bunk and chow down with the cowboys and farmhands. By the time he graduated, he had decided to turn his passion into a profession. When he and Jon announced that they wanted to become partners in a ranch, which Land would run, their father supported it wholeheartedly. Lindbergh knew the attractions of that life but warned his two eldest sons, “You both have deep, reasoning, and penetrating minds that will probably become restless if you try to keep them inside the barbed wire of a cow pasture, even a big cow pasture.” After debating both sides of the issue in a long letter—and asking the boys to consider a location far from a “major fallout area” in the event of an atomic war—Lindbergh asked to participate in the venture as well.

  Growing up in less solitude than the elder siblings, the three youngest Lindbergh children paid a price for being celebrities’ children. Young Anne was most sensitive to the problems of having a famous father, that feeling of being “different.” A captivating, petite blonde, Ansy maintained an air of modesty, even as she excelled in her studies, athletics, and music, playing both flute and piano; but she often felt all eyes were on her because she was a Lindbergh. “I wish I were the daughter of a shoemaker!” she angrily said to her father one day, explaining that a reporter from McCall’s was writing up a dinner her Latin class was giving, only because the first Lindbergh daughter was part of the event.

  Worse for her than her father’s apparent omnipresence was his repeated absence. Years later, Ansy reread diaries she had kept in the 1950s and was astonished at how little there was about him, even though, she later noted, “I remember clearly that I never stopped thinking about him.” For two of those years, she used to write letters to an imaginary friend named Carolyn, the salutations of which she shortened to “Dear Cal.” It did not occur to her until many years later that she was actually writing to Charles A. Lindbergh—C.A.L. In 1958, she left for Radcliffe.

  Scott Lindbergh was the most complicated of the Lindbergh children, the most sensitive of the boys. The stories he used to write as a child were invariably full of magic and exotic backgrounds; at the same time, he was always intrigued by practical problems. With great admiration, Charles wrote of him to Anne, “I have never known anyone, adult or child, with his ability to pull up out of what seem hopeless depths—he starts right in at times I would have said, ‘To Hell with it, there’s another morning coming tomorrow, and I’m going to get a night’s sleep’—and he usually ends up successfully.” And yet there was a growing restlessness within Scott, spurts of quiet defiance that Charles felt he had to squelch. He came down hardest on him.

  Anne took up his cause. For one of the first times, she stood up to Charles, insisting that it was detrimental to denigrate Scott so relentlessly. “Did your Father … treat you like this?” she asked rhetorically, not knowing that C.A. had been worse. Anne insisted that “Scott needs support & not knocking down all the time.” Charles countered that “Scott must learn to think—not to be careless…. His life may depend on it,” especially in this dangerous new age. “Machinery,” he said, “doesn’t forgive.”

  “Neither,” Anne snapped back, �
�does the unconscious.” In great anger she asked, “What do you think it does to a person to have everything he does called wrong?” In Scott’s case, it became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he was always losing wallets and articles of clothing, showing up late, procrastinating. He felt he was not popular at school, that he was considered a “card,” yet another reputation he had to live up to.

  The youngest child, Reeve, fought a losing battle all her life. With big blue eyes and blonde ringlets, hyperarticulate from the moment she could speak, her primary task seemed to be in corraling her straying family members. As a toddler, she once told her mother, “When you … find Father, you tell him he must come back sometime.” Her attitude hardly changed over the years.

  Lindbergh related better to his children as they became adults, finding them more interesting as they grew more independent. Such was not always the case with his wife. The new social life Anne was creating for herself hardly engaged him. It seemed stuffy, full of overly refined friends with little practical experience in the world, people prone to analyzing the subtext of everything and talking endlessly about “relationships.” “You have so many orchids in your life,” he once complained to her. “You should collect a few cabbages.”