Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  For the next two weeks, Lindbergh remained off the coast of the Udjung Kulon. His ground base, where he slept on a split-bamboo floor of a guardhouse at night, was a two-minute walk to a white-sand beach and a three-minute swim to a coral bed of spectacular forms and colors. Immediately inland, Lindbergh entered tropical jungle, where python-thick vines and densely leafed branches crawled over multi-trunked trees. Besides the multitude of strange screeching birds, he was surrounded by wild pigs, giant lizards, bats, swinging monkeys, herds of banteng—wild oxen—and the occasional leopard. By the time he had returned to Jakarta, Lindbergh was informed that the government had issued orders increasing penalties for poaching and that further conservation measures were already under discussion. “I have never visited a more attractive area of jungle, sea, and wild life,” Lindbergh wrote the Minister of Economical Affairs and Finance afterward, noting that his fortnight in the jungle had given him the feeling “that I existed not in the 20th century but in epochs past.”

  Thus, Lindbergh spent the sixties in a time warp of his own making, in a primeval forest one week and ultramodern laboratories the next. For no sooner would he be back in civilization than the medical community would call on him to discuss the future. When Dr. Theodore I. Malinin and Lieutenant Vernon Perry, who were expanding the study of organ perfusion, informed Lindbergh that his 1935 pump was still practical but limited in the new field of cryobiological perfusion research, Lindbergh developed a new machine of glass and plastic which could accommodate larger organs and withstand colder temperatures—a necessary step in developing a storage bank of human organs for transplantation. Dr. William W. L. Glenn of Yale University demonstrated for Lindbergh the most modern heart-lung machines at his hospital as well as some of the latest work on the remote stimulation of tissue by radiofrequency in exchange for his addressing a small group of doctors about his work with Carrel. Dr. Denton A. Cooley invited Lindbergh to the Texas Medical Center in Houston to watch him perform heart surgery and solicited his suggestions and advice.

  “Diseases have been conquered, suffering minimized, infant mortality reduced, longevity extended,” Lindbergh wrote of the physical sciences; but mindful of an overpopulated world, he urged new technologies to develop “agricultural machinery, hybrid crops, synthetic foods, artificial fertilizers, oceanic products—a lengthening list of techniques for increasing the world’s … productivity.” Increasingly, Lindbergh found the answers lay in maintaining balance. As he wrote in an article in the Christmas 1967 issue of Life, “The primitive emphasizes factors of survival and the mysteries beyond them. Modern civilization places emphasis on increasing knowledge and the application of technology to man’s way of life. The human future depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness.”

  Lindbergh sorted out many of his thoughts about “balance” in a voluminous correspondence with Harry Guggenheim on such sociological topics as leadership, dominance, competition, and the abolition of war—all as part of a “Man’s Relation to Man Project” sponsored by Guggenheim’s foundation. Inevitably, his thinking kept rebounding to the single issue he believed underlay most of the world’s concerns—eugenics. It was a loaded word; but he believed in its literal meaning and positive possibilities. Guggenheim’s friends periodically dredged up the old charges of racism and anti-Semitism against Lindbergh; but Guggenheim found them ridiculous. He took Lindbergh at his word when he wrote, “the idea of racial inferiority or superiority is foreign to me.” One of the few men on earth to live among primitive people of all skin colors, Lindbergh asserted, “I can’t feel inferior or superior to another man because of race, or in any way antagonistic to him. I judge by the individual, not by his race, and have always done so. I would rather have one of my children marry into a good family of any race than into a bad family of any other race.”

  Obsessed with improving the quality of life for future generations, Lindbergh never tired of discussing reproduction. He encouraged all his children to have healthy sex lives, which included understanding the “critical importance of genetic inheritance.” Coming of age in the Lindbergh family involved numerous lectures about natural selection: the boys heard countless warnings about women who might entrap them by becoming pregnant; the girls were cautioned not to let emotions blind them to the qualities they really sought in men.

  “If I had to choose but one thing I could impress on my children from whatever wisdom I have gained in life,” he wrote his youngest, Reeve, in 1966, shortly before she became engaged to a Harvard-educated photographer named Richard Brown, “it would be the importance of genetics in mating.” Overlooking the facts that at least two generations of Lodges and Morrows had been afflicted with mental illness, and that both Reeve’s grandfathers had died prematurely of natural causes, he wrote her, “You have a good inheritance both physically and mentally. Preserve it and pass it on to your children, together with the realization of the importance of passing it on to them. Nothing attainable by man has as great value.” That included the trust funds Lindbergh had established for his children, to which he had by then surrendered more of his wealth than he had maintained for himself.

  “Advice should always be listened to and seldom followed,” Lindbergh often told his children. But it generally proved easier to heed their father’s words than to defy them. The sheer relentlessness of his ensuing arguments on matters of finance, romance, careers, or politics was usually enough to silence his family members though not necessarily convert them. (“I am most anxious that you don’t become one of those Cambridge intellectual and scatter-brained faddists who talk so intensely and loosely about important subjects with which they have neither had much personal contact nor spent much time objectively investigating,” he wrote Reeve as Vietnam was flaring up—one of the few issues in his lifetime which he did not see in black-and-white terms. Off the record, Lindbergh called Vietnam a “bad battlefield badly chosen,” an engagement America should have avoided, despite his belief in “any operations which prevent the spread of Communism in Asia.” Once committed, however, he believed America should have invaded with full force, even though he deplored the defoliation of the country.) Lindbergh invariably imposed his will on all his children—except one.

  Through the sixties, Lindbergh and his youngest son seemed to disagree on everything, except their means of argument. At that, Scott inherited his father’s ability to bore in on a matter without letting go of a point until the other had conceded. In practically every visit and letter, Lindbergh took Scott to task for some infraction involving his money, his sports car, his education, or the condition in which he left the chalet. Scott responded with letters longer than he received, matching his father point by point, often with disarming candor. “Granted I have been, I still am, irresponsible,” he wrote in 1963. “I follow the prompting of my dreams to an excess. I assert immature statements, sometimes out of genuine belief, sometimes out of pure perversity. I have made a thousand suggestions, procreated dozens of plans, most of which I have been unable to fulfill.” Over the next four years, tensions only mounted, as Scott’s behavior became increasingly provocative. With the threat of fighting in Vietnam hanging over every young American male, General Lindbergh’s youngest son told his family in 1967 that he was renouncing his American citizenship.

  His father reacted with predictable anger, his dialectics becoming diatribes. “At twenty-five,” he wrote his son, “you are a man. Unlike your brothers, you have not shown much realization of the fact. You claim to stand on your ideals; but you have conducted yourself in anything but an idealistic manner. You accept your living income from the United States; but you refuse to take your part in the support of your country. You have made of yourself an example that argues for increasing the legal minimum age for drivers, witholding [sic] the outright gift of money from parents to their children; and the enactment of laws in relation to a country’s support of individuals who refuse to support their country. As far as I am concerned, you convince me
that I gave you too much confidence and freedom before you were of legal age, and that it was a mistake for me to arrange that you be financially independent thereafter.” He called his son an “ass.”

  “You are not the first, but the fourth generation of Lindbergh ‘rebels,’” Lindbergh wrote Scott in January 1968. “I actively opposed ways of life my country was establishing, and my father before me, and his father before him. I like and admire your rebellion, and up to a point it makes me feel even closer to you. What worries me most is that I feel elements of irrationality in your rebellion that can destroy both your effectiveness and you.” Scott maintained his citizenship but withdrew into a life of his own in Europe, studying animal behavior in France, and falling in love with Alika Watteau, a Belgian writer-painter-actress—fifteen years his senior—who was also an animal-rights activist with two rare pet monkeys. (Charles had not met her, but had gathered from family members who had that she was not an ideal mate for Scott.)

  After sending letters to his son every few weeks for several months without a reply, Lindbergh conceded “there is not much use in my continuing to write to you.” He reminded him of the jams he had helped him through and the independence he had created for him. “What strikes me hardest is my loss of confidence in you and respect for you,” he wrote Scott that March, “and my realization that if you were not my son you would be the kind of a fellow I wouldn’t want to have much to do with…. It seems to me you are already in the early stages of disaster as far as your life is concerned.”

  Scott responded with a volley of letters that spring. “I am going to marry Alika in a few days,” he announced on April 1, 1968, not giving his father time to respond or even to meet the bride. Lindbergh took this sudden action as a personal slight, which initiated a period of estrangement between father and son.

  Anne felt she had failed Scott in not protecting him more from Charles, that she should have supported him more in his choice of schools and in his desire to seek psychiatric help. She also knew she never could have succeeded in countermanding his father. Scott “prefers to learn from the world than to learn from you,” Anne had tried to explain to Charles. “It may be the harsher way to learn but it may be the best way for Scott to learn.” And so the rift not only put a strain on all the Lindbergh children but it also wedged their parents further apart. Anne’s heart still melted whenever her husband telephoned from some distant land to announce his return home; but she came to find his presence an intrusion and his absence an insult.

  Abandoning the one family house that had felt like hers and moving into two new houses, seeing her children marry and her grandchildren born, Anne had further lost the ability to concentrate on her literary work. The last decade had allowed her to publish but one thin novel—Dearly Beloved, an occasionally forlorn look at marriage—and a few articles. Often feeling at loose ends while her husband patrolled the world, she felt up for little more than traipsing through her diaries and contemplating a book on middle age. “No news from C.A.L.!” she wrote her sister in January 1968. “I now am beginning to feel harassed—not knowing what I’m doing … I wish I knew. It makes everything else uncertain & wavery & unreal not to know. I have been expecting him every day for a week.” She felt taken for granted, useless—depressed, as she wrote in her diary, by “the sense of getting older, the slowing down of my writing … and a general sense of not being needed by anyone—child or husband.”

  Charles had long planned to take Anne on a three-week vacation at winter’s end to the Hawaiian Islands, as guests of his friend Sam Pryor, a retired Pan American executive. Once at Pryor’s garden spot on Maui, both Lindberghs found themselves caught up in efforts to preserve a park on the island and in discussions relating to the establishment of ocean wilderness and park areas in the Pacific. Charles planned to go from there to Japan to address the whale crisis.

  Just when they hoped to settle down for a few days of rest, Lindbergh overheard a telephone conversation between Pryor and his daughter in Alaska. She was lamenting the fact that a bill protecting Arctic wolves, which her husband, State Senator Lowell Thomas, Jr., was trying to get the legislature to pass, appeared headed for defeat. When Lindbergh learned the entire contents of the conversation, he turned to Pryor and said, “Let’s go up and help him.” Because Lindbergh had not made a public speech in nearly fifteen years, Pryor puzzledly looked at his guest and asked when. Lindbergh said, “Let’s go tomorrow.”

  They flew into Juneau on March seventeenth, keeping Lindbergh’s appearance secret from all but the state’s top officials. Governor Walter J. Hickel invited Lindbergh to be his guest in a private upstairs apartment at the Governor’s Mansion. Rumors of his presence circulated around the capital the next day, but few believed them. At 10:15 on the morning of the nineteenth, Thomas and House Speaker Ted Stevens escorted him into the House chamber. The startled legislators and spectators welcomed him with a standing ovation, and he offered a shy smile in return.

  Lindbergh spoke extemporaneously that morning, apologizing for being a little “rusty” at speech-making. His humility quickly won the crowd over. After recalling his first visit to Alaska in 1931, in the Sirius with Anne, he proceeded to the purpose of his address, the importance of conservation in Alaska—because “what you do here,” he said, “is going to be watched closely by the entire world.” He spoke of pollution and erosion in the south of the state and the need to protect the animals in the north, even if that meant the elimination of bounties on predator animals. The brief appearance electrified the audience and received extensive press coverage. Representative Thomas described his guest’s impact on conservation in the state as nothing short of a “miracle.” He wrote Lindbergh that his presence inspired the legislature to pass immediate protective legislation. One of his colleagues said, “Seeing him today was like seeing someone come back from the dead. I’ll never forget it. This was one of the most important moments of my life.”

  The next day, Lindbergh left for Tokyo, keeping an eye on the calendar because of a Pan American board meeting in New York in early April and engagements in Europe shortly after that. He would stop first in Hawaii, however, not only to collect his wife but also because he had fallen in love anew there—with Hana.

  19

  ALOHA

  “… a life stream is like a mountain river—springing from hidden

  sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending

  evolving in the shape momentarily seen…. Now it ends,

  apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall.”

  —C.A.L.

  ISOLATED FROM ANY CONTINENT BY MORE THAN TWO THOUsand miles of Pacific Ocean bask the Hawaiian Islands. The second largest bit of land in this volcanic archipelago, only some seven hundred square miles, is named for the Hawaiian demigod credited in Polynesian lore with fishing these islands, shoals, and reefs up from the sea—Maui. The most popular areas of Maui lie to the north and west. Some people are thus attracted to its opposite side, several hours away by car.

  The two-lane Hana Highway parallels the tortuous lava-formed coastline, passing through forests and over streams and past waterfalls. After more than six hundred hard turns and fifty-six single-lane bridges, palm-bordered ranches, pineapple and sugarcane fields, red- and black-sand beaches, jungle and volcanic craters all converge at Hana. The town even boasts its own concrete strip of an airport. From his first visit in 1968, the warmth of Hana—the gentle moist air, the mild water, the aloha spirit—soothed Lindbergh’s soul as well as his body.

  By that time, Hana had become a second home to several wealthy Americans. A few, like Sam Pryor, were especially entranced by a corner of this Shangri-la farther south, down the unpaved continuation of the coast road. Over the course of the ten miles of mud and potholes and moss-covered concrete bridges, past the waterfall-fed pools in Ohe’o Gulch (which, for publicity purposes, the local hotel christened the Seven Sacred Pools), the setting grew more lush. Orchids, hydrangea, anthuriums, hibiscus, and
bougainvillea in shocking colors blossomed everywhere; and the sweet fragrance of plumeria, papaya, mango, and guava clung to the air. Here in Kipahulu a few houses were perched on the cliffs, with sudden dropoffs to the rock-crashing water below.

  Amid dense foliage in this distant corner of this far-off island, Sam and Mary Taylor Pryor carved out a simple estate, a large A-frame on one hundred acres of rolling grassland—with plenty of room for his pet gibbons, which he dressed up as children. An influential figure in town, Pryor strove to maintain the purity of Kipahulu by seeing that electricity never extended that far south. Lindbergh was enthralled by the remote location, the rugged landscape, and the rustic living. “I have never seen a more attractive place to live,” he wrote Pryor upon returning to Darien. Lindbergh asked his friend to look out for any land in the area that might come up for sale, a plot on the coast where he could build a small house.

  Pryor did better than that. He offered the Lindberghs five of his own acres, which they purchased for $25,000. Charles immediately drew plans and met with the builder who would construct their two-story A-frame, a modest boulder-and-concrete house with three small bedrooms and two baths. Work on the property began in the summer of 1969.

  After spending a few weeks that rainy spring in the Pryors’ guesthouse, waiting for her husband’s arrival, Anne had soured on the idea of building there. “It is a beautiful coast—wild & beautiful—like a tropical Illiec,” she granted, “but not the kind of place I want to be in alone—difficult of access—isolated—inconvenient to run—3/4 hour away on a terrible washed out road from the nearest general store or settlement—no electricity … no help—and a damp climate.” Worse than the inconvenience was the fact that Hana would contribute to her transience. “While C.A.L. can be himself anywhere & seems to find his roots in flight itself—in change—in action,” Anne wrote in her diary, “I, who long to feel rooted more & more as I grow older—… am more and more ‘déséquilibrée’ by great leaps of air-travel—time-change—& new habitats.” She tried to talk herself into liking Maui, but she kept coming back to the question of her ability to put down any roots there. “And if I do,” she wondered, “won’t they just be torn up again?”