Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Anne did not disagree. She was aware that she found solace playing analyst and nursemaid to a lot of effusive women. She also found herself, for the first time, opening up to men. Several of her repressed gentlemen friends found this sudden emotional availability like catnip. The husband of one of Anne’s best friends launched into his own private correspondence with her, pouring out his heart; and Corliss Lamont, who had been carrying the torch for Anne since childhood, resurfaced in her life, professing his undying love for her. Failing to see his wife’s need for admirers, Charles had little use for these people who, he felt, were wasting Anne’s time with their problems. He called them “lame ducks.”

  Lindbergh even lumped Dr. Atchley into that category. And so he paid no attention to the regular exchange of Atchley’s little yellow notes for Anne’s “blue vitamins.” He did not know they spoke almost every morning, quietly ministering to each other’s loneliness. On top of her frequent visits to his office, they began to appear in public together, at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Katharine Hepburn, a friend and patient of Dr. Atchley, occasionally saw them on the town together. “But, of course,” she presumed, “they were both too respectable to do anything about their feelings.” Miss Hepburn was wrong.

  Englewood society buzzed that Atchley’s marriage had soured because his wife had taken to mistreating him in public in retaliation for a secret affair in which he was engaged. “Nobody ever knew with whom,” corroborated writer James Lord, who had been raised in the New Jersey town. While the doctor’s Manhattan waiting room had become a harem of admirers—including such desirable women as Hepburn, Garbo, and Nancy “Slim” Hayward—Dr. Atchley had fallen in love with Anne Lindbergh.

  The friendship of these two longing souls blossomed into a love affair in 1956 and continued for the next few years. “I wish I could take a nice long walk in the dry cold air and come back to a warm fire and a martini (or two), and then talk, talk, talk,” he wrote in one of his missives at the peak of their relationship. “I am so full of people in trouble … and your wit, warmth and wisdom would solve everything.” Most of his notes during this period were discreet effusions about how much he craved her company and was frustrated when they were apart. “I found myself urging you not to be late tomorrow,” he wrote her in March 1956. “I am going to join A. A. (only the A. isn’t for alcoholics).”

  Anne divulged her adultery only to her sister and a handful of other confidantes. Her daughter Ansy stumbled across it one day shortly before starting Radcliffe and always wondered whether her discovery had been accidental. She noticed an unopened letter on a table addressed to “Anne Lindbergh” and assumed that she was the addressee. “I was in the middle of reading what was obviously a love letter,” she later recounted, “when Mother came in and said, ‘I believe that’s mine.’” Only afterward did her unembarrassed mother comment, “You should not have seen that.”

  Many years later, Reeve Lindbergh would comment on the difficulty it must have been for Ansy to grow up in her mother’s shadow while carrying the same name. It was perhaps more difficult for their mother, going through menopause, to see her beautiful and brilliant young daughter come of age. “I always felt,” Ansy recalled, “that it was important to Mother that I know about her affair with Dr. Atchley. My sense,” Ansy said, “is that Father never knew … or, rather, never chose to know. He knew that Mother loved him and would never leave him. And that was all he needed to know.”

  In the heat of the relationship, during the summer of 1956, Anne lost her wedding ring; and the Freudian implications were not lost on her. “There are no accidents in Psychiatry,” she wrote her sister Constance.

  A few months later Anne rented an apartment in New York City, two small rooms at 146 East Nineteenth Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place. She was abandoning neither her house nor her family in Connecticut; it simply provided her “the new frame for seeing people & a place to escape to for a night.” Dr. Atchley became a frequent visitor, for quiet dinners and martinis as well as the occasional breakfast they might host for their most intimate friends. The notes that continued to pass between them suggest deep, fulfilling love, what Atchley wrote was “one outstanding reason why I am glad I was born … a wonderful thing to happen to a human being—and so few are so lucky.” After they saw the motion-picture version of The King and I together, Atchley found himself humming the song “Hello Young Lovers,” a wistful recollection of one in middle age recounting, “All of my memories are happy tonight, for I’ve had a love of my own.” The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical moved Anne as well and seemed to play a role in her making a decision about her domestic situation.

  By late 1958, Anne’s life was considerably brighter than it had been at the start of the decade. She was even back at work, trying her hand at fiction again. Only her marriage remained problematic, and to a few friends, such as Alan and Lucia Valentine, she raised the option of divorce. But another ballad from The King and I kept playing in her ear, a song in which Lady Thiang, the mother of the King’s oldest son, describes Anna Leonowens’s feelings for the self-contained King of Siam.

  The thoughtless things he’ll do

  Will hurt and worry you

  Then, all at once, he’ll do

  Something wonderful.

  You’ll always go along,

  Defend him when he’s wrong

  And tell him when he’s strong,

  He is wonderful.

  He’ll always need your love

  And so he’ll get your love

  A man who needs your love

  Can be wonderful.

  Anne recommitted herself to her husband. It was not the song, of course, that changed her thinking. It was more, as her daughter Reeve commented on Anne’s general behavior, that “Mother enjoyed wearing her hairshirt—finding pleasure in the misery of situations.” Although her marriage continued to cause her considerable pain and unrest—literally, headaches, indigestion, and sleeplessness—she wrote her sister, “I must accept the fact that my husband is as completely different from me as he can be—gets his stimulus differently, his contacts with people differently, his refreshment differently.” She realized that in some ways they were “badly mated.” But looking back on thirty years of marriage, she realized not only that she did not want it to end but also that she evidently had the kind of marriage she wanted. She tamped her affair with Dana Atchley down to a warm friendship.

  “There were two suns in our solar system,” Reeve once remarked of the experience of growing up Lindbergh. From the end of 1958 forward, as often as not, those two suns would rise on any given day over two separate continents.

  18

  ALONE TOGETHER

  “Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.”

  —C.A.L.

  “C. IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE HIS PATTERN OF BEING AWAY from home most of the time,” Anne explained to her diary on February 12, 1959. “I must plan—as a widow—to augment my life.” She realized this meant more than gardening, shopping, and spending additional time with her family to “gay up life.” She would have to get a new dog for protection and start collecting single men who could escort her to dinner, the theater, and ski slopes. “It is all rather hollow,” Anne admitted, facing her Hobson’s choice of an occasional husband or none at all. Since the beginning of their storybook romance, the Lindberghs had never been so estranged.

  As each of the children left his dominion, Charles became increasingly independent, footloose. Barnstorming the world, he had not seemed so vigorous since his youth. Psychiatrist John Rosen believed he was “running away from old age” and “intimacy.” Having completed her therapy with Dr. Rosen, Anne felt generations of Lindberghs had kept themselves in perpetual motion to keep from examining their feelings. She believed Charles’s compulsive need to travel was related to the loss of their firstborn, whose death he never fully mourned.

  In the spring of 1959, Anne considered an offer from Kurt and Helen Wolff, who were then being
eased out of Pantheon Books. Temporarily retiring to Zurich, they asked Anne to spend a quiet summer with them. “One should be pampered from time to time,” Helen wrote her, “the soul needs it as much as the body.” Before she could commit, Charles coopted the plan. He proposed instead that they rent their own chalet together in Switzerland, which had become central to his European inspection tours for Pan American. Anne figured she stood a greater chance of being with her husband away than at home.

  On July ninth, Lindbergh met his wife at the Geneva airport in a Volkswagen he had bought, then drove almost four hours, north around the lake through Lausanne and Montreux and down the Rhone Valley into the mountain village of Les Paccots sur Châtel St. Denis in the canton of Vaud. It was too dark for Anne to see much as they twisted through vineyards, orchards, and dark streets of tiny Swiss villages. Then Charles took an even more obscure back road to their house through a barnyard, getting stuck in a manure pile. Exhausted from a long day of travel and a wilting European heatwave, Anne squeezed out of the car into a new cement “apartment-house” of a chalet. The Lindberghs were on the third floor, a few simple rooms with a modern bath across the hall. It all seemed a high price to pay just to spend some time with her husband; but when Anne woke at noon her mood instantly brightened. The breathtaking view out her window revealed the deep valley in which they were nestled, between the Rhone below and snowcapped mountains above. Before the day had ended, Anne had visited the castle where Rilke had written his final poems and the little churchyard in which he was buried.

  The Lindberghs had not been ensconced in “balcony living” a week before the Wolffs invited them to meet one of their authors, the renowned Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. “The great old man rather likes distinguished visitors, particularly Americans,” they wrote Anne. “And I am sure you and Charles would find him fascinating.” Both Lindberghs eagerly accepted the invitation. Anne was especially interested in his departure from Freudian analysis and his theories of the collective unconscious as manifested in archetypal images and symbols.

  They met the “old wizard,” as Anne described him, at his lakeside home in Bolligen. Charles at once felt “elements of mysticism and greatness about him—even though they may have been mixed, at times, with elements of charlatanism.” Sitting in his small drawing room, Lindbergh asked the seventy-five-year-old Jung why he chose to live down by the water instead of up in the mountains. Jung explained his connection to the lake at their side, how its depths brought to mind different levels of the human subconscious. Helen Wolff was as interested in the question as in the answer. She thought to herself: “the eagle and the fish.”

  Jung abruptly changed the subject to flying saucers. “I had expected a fascinating discussion about psychological aspects of the numerous and recurring flying-saucer reports,” Lindbergh later recorded. But he found, to his astonishment, that Jung believed all the reports and was no more interested in the psychology of the phenomenon than he was in learning any facts about it. When Lindbergh told him that the United States Air Force had investigated hundreds of reported sightings without finding a shred of evidence of supernatural phenomena, Jung indicated he did not wish to pursue the discussion much further. He referred to a book about flying saucers by Donald Keyhoe, the very pilot who had flown alongside Lindbergh on his forty-eight-state tour of the United States in 1927, which reported numerous sightings of unidentified flying objects. When Lindbergh said he had heard recently that Keyhoe had, in fact, experienced several nervous breakdowns, Jung replied, “I dare say he has.”

  Lindbergh added that he had discussed with Chief of the United States Air Force General Spaatz the recent flurry of UFO reports. “Slim,” Spaatz had said, “don’t you suppose that if there was anything true about this flying-saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?” Jung was not impressed. “There are,” he said, ending their conversation, “a great many things going on around this earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know about.”

  Although Anne saw only a little more of her husband that summer than she would have had she stayed in Connecticut, the Helvetian getaway at least prepared her for Charles’s startling suggestion that they temporarily abandon their house in Darien for a chalet of their own in Vaud. With two children married and the next two college-bound, Anne had come to see the increasing impracticality of their big suburban home. She hoped that the “unfamiliar setting of a foreign land” might provide her with “a fresh perspective on our lives, and the next turning of the road, life without children.” She agreed to put the Darien house in the hands of a caretaker and return to Vaud for much of 1960.

  The Lindberghs still spent much of their year apart, seeing each other only on the occasions when their separate itineraries crisscrossed. As a result, he missed several tormented romantic relationships in Ansy’s life; and he failed to appreciate her need to rush off to emergency sessions with Dr. Rosen or to study the flute in France before returning to Radcliffe. He missed Scott’s graduation from Darien High School and the decisions regarding his higher education, which resulted in his entering Amherst College. And he missed his son Land’s wedding to Susan Miller, a cousin of Jon’s wife.

  Despite his poor attendance record, Anne had always assumed Charles would be there for her in sickness if not in health. In the spring of 1960, she learned otherwise. She had to undergo knee surgery, which proved to be more complicated than anticipated, and she was bedridden for several weeks at Harkness Pavilion under Dr. Atchley’s watchful eye. Although Charles knew about the operation, he never showed up. “Where are you?” she cried out in a pathetic letter to her husband two weeks after the procedure. “I know I made light of the operation but I did hope you’d get here in time to take me home. Of course, I can arrange … a limousine but I wanted it to be you. It would help so…. Please come home as soon as you can. This is a time when I need you.”

  Lindbergh returned weeks later, “astonished” not to find his wife in Darien. The next morning, he called the hospital, asking only, “Aren’t you ever coming home?!” She was two months on crutches and several more on a cane, during which time he lent almost no support. His rages returned, as he repeatedly exploded in irritation at her for “making mountains out of molehills,” at her “heavy way of doing everything,” at how badly she managed her life, at how much time she wasted. His “sermons” contained enough truth to muzzle her. But she bristled at his insensitivity to the fact that it was her constant presence at home that enabled him to lead his supercharged life orbiting the globe. He had all the time in the world, for example, to tend to his dying uncle, Charles Land.

  While placing eighty-two-year-old “Brother” in a sanitarium in Luzern, Charles had, in fact, searched for a place to build a chalet in Switzerland for Anne. Ten days after inspecting an unsatisfactory site recommended by some Swiss friends, he saw several acres on the southern slope of Monts de Corsier, not twenty minutes above the town of Vevey, and bought them on the spot for $20,000. More than eight hundred meters above sea level, the secluded site offered a commanding view of Lac Leman, the Rhone valley, and the Alps. The property, surrounded by fields full of crops and cattle, backed onto a green pasture, which ran to the base of a steep cliff and was topped by a forest of beech and fir. “I need your help in … designing a chalet,” Charles enthusiastically wrote Anne back in Darien, though he had, in fact, already drawn it in his mind and consulted with a builder.

  Construction of the simple two-story structure began in the summer of 1962. The twenty-three-by-twenty-four-foot main floor consisted of a bedroom, bath, and a combination living room-kitchen; below were the garage, two small bedrooms, and a half-bath. Renting a chalet in the neighboring canton of Fribourg while their own was being built, they watched their new house progress.

  Lindbergh’s blueprints did not end there. Consumed with streamlining his life, he had recently written old General Wood, “the less I have, the most satisfied I am.” In that spirit, he wanted to divide his four and one-
half acres at Scott’s Cove, sell the house, and build a smaller one for himself and Anne next door. He drafted two pages of specifications, the essence of which was: “emphasis on smallness of appearance, simplicity of construction and upkeep, proportion, texture of materials, appropriateness to woods, tides, and informal surroundings.” His checklist was detailed enough to include cork stoppers in the tubs and basins instead of mechanisms that would wear out and a hook on the roof for block and tackle, for hoisting large pieces of furniture upstairs.

  Anne tried to sort out what these sudden changes might mean to their lives. “We can’t all move back to Europe,” she thought, “when we’ve just come home to America. This is no family homestead we are contemplating, not even a summer one. It would be too small and too far away. Is it our old-age home, when the children leave us? Is it a European perch for C.? A place to write for me?” Just when she thought she was being forced to enter a phase of “living for oneself,” she went along with the Swiss plans, buying into a dream that she and Charles might reclaim a part of their marriage that they had obviously lost. Moving from the present house in Scott’s Cove into a smaller one seemed only a scaling down of her old life. “The chalet,” she wrote, “sounds like an extension of life—perhaps even a new life.”

  By the spring of 1963, the chalet was habitable. Charles and Anne moved in with sleeping bags and air mattresses, two card tables and four wooden chairs. Within weeks some basic furniture arrived. Charles marveled at Anne’s transforming the plaster-and-wood lodge into a cozy home—with books on the shelves, weavings by Land’s wife on the wall, and objets d’art carefully placed among antique chests and cabinets. She soon had geraniums and petunias blooming in pots on the balcony. (In a few years, the Lindberghs would build another one-room chalet higher up their cliff, an even simpler, thick-planked abode to which Anne could retreat and write.)