Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  The hardest volume for Anne to assemble proved to be the years between 1939 and 1945, which she entitled War Within and Without. Her purpose in publishing it, she wrote in a long introductory essay, was “to show the unwritten side of [my husband’s] Wartime Journals, to say the things he could never say. By looking at the inner side of a tapestry, one can often uncover patterns and colors that reveal a complexity and meaning invisible on the surface.” To her friend Lucia Valentine, Anne wrote, “I must not struggle so hard to defend him, but there are sides that must be shown—the record should be there. Only then can I be free to let him go—to let the public figure go.” She would publish no new books after that.

  After a half-century of the practice, Anne became dilatory in her diary-keeping. Preparing the earlier works for publication was only part of the reason. The Lindbergh marriage had become a one-sided affair, at Charles’s disposal whenever he chose to partake; and that proved too dispiriting to record. When they were together, he expected her attention to be focused on him, his self-absorption reaching comical proportions. He sometimes forbade her to pick up the telephone when it rang; and if he found her spending too much time gabbing to friends, he sometimes grabbed his gun from the closet and threatened to shoot the phone. When Anne replaced some seventy-five-year-old mattresses in the guestroom with a new set—bought on sale at Bloomingdales—it sparked a sermon on her contributing to the fall of civilization. He became obsessed with the general breakdown of law and order and the upsurge in anarchy, and he often groused about “what’s happening to the country.” In some cases, he had just cause—especially in discussing airplanes, which had become crime zones, as terrorist hijackings were becoming epidemic. He would say “It’s no time to be living around a big city.” And she would reply, “It’s no time to be flying between homes.”

  Their conversations became more contentious, with Anne constantly wondering when her husband would reappear next. The children provided all the emotional support they could. “I don’t think [Father’s] fair to do this to you again, even without torrential rainstorms,” Reeve wrote her mother in the spring of 1972, when Lindbergh was returning from yet another trip to the Philippines. “What does the monkey-eating eagle got that you don’t got, I’d like to know.” But with Jon pursuing oceanographic interests and raising salmon in Washington, Land ranching in Montana, Ansy writing children’s books in France, and Reeve teaching in Vermont—all raising children of their own—there was little any of them could do for their mother.

  Ironically, Scott was the one who brought his parents together, but only for a moment. After sharing their shock over the news of his marriage, Anne’s feelings turned to remorse while Charles’s turned to rage. She visited Scott on her visits to Europe and wrote sympathetic letters to him. He stopped seeing his son and fired off curt, and occasionally cruel, letters. “I am disgusted with you and ashamed of you,” he wrote one year after Scott’s marriage; “but I still care for you, deeply. What relationship this will bring between us in the future, I do not know.” A few more rounds of letters in 1969 brought them to an impasse. “When you awake to what you have been and are doing to yourself,” he wrote on June second, “if I can be of help please let me know.” Closing the letter, “My love to you always,” he stopped writing him.

  Through Anne’s visits and reports from his other children, Lindbergh remained apprised of Scott’s progress, of his graduate work in animal psychology at Strasbourg University and his creating an eighty-acre research preserve in the Dordogne, where he and his wife studied South American howler monkeys. But Lindbergh maintained his silence for almost three years. In April 1972, shortly after his seventieth birthday, he tried to break the deadlock, writing, “I do not know whether I will see you, hear from you, or write to you again. If not, then I would like to leave this with you as my last message…. You have the ability to succeed in about anything you seriously apply yourself to. But I want to again emphasize to you that professional and material success, no matter how great, is trivial in comparison to what you make of yourself as a man.”

  Scott invited his father to visit him and his wife in their animal habitat. But Lindbergh refused, still disapproving of “the standards and the way of life you have apparently laid out for yourself.” While he said he would always welcome Scott’s letters, another year of silence lapsed between them. In April 1973, Scott sent his father a compelling description of his work, which involved studying monkey societies and relating their feelings to human emotions. Lindbergh replied, recalling the days when he and Dr. Carrel had talked of raising apes on a small island. Then he chilled his response by adding that he hoped the second half of Scott’s life “is not going to be expended largely in raising and experimenting with monkeys.” He asked, “Are you going to be content as an American living on an inherited income in a chateau in southern France while the world about you is aflame in many areas and in a state of flux unparalleled in history?” The former silence returned.

  There was, in fact, an unspoken explanation for Lindbergh’s sudden reaching out and his irrational withdrawals. This decade-long struggle over control had become part of a larger battle of body and emotions in which Lindbergh found himself engaged. During a routine physical examination in October 1972, Dr. George Hyman had discovered an abnormal node that proved to be a lymphoma; another irregular node further suggested cancer. At the end of the month Lindbergh checked into a small room in the Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York as Mr. August to have the growths removed and biopsied. The diagnosis had been correct, and on January 31, 1973, he began three days of radiation therapy.

  Lindbergh had a severe anemic reaction to his treatment and had never felt so terrible in his life. For the next few months he was weak and tired. He shed thirty pounds from his already lean frame, and he looked drawn. He and Anne told everyone, including their children, that he had contracted a virus during his travels. He chose to recuperate in Maui, where the Hawaiian sun brought some color to his face. He was soon eating again and sleeping well.

  One morning, he walked to the Pryors and asked his friend a question with enough nonchalance not to arouse any suspicion. “Sam,” he queried, “where are you going be buried?” Pryor was startled but answered without hesitation. “Right behind the little church I’ve restored about twenty minutes walk from here.” Lindbergh said he would like to see it; and they hiked down a dirt road to the Ho’omau Congregational Church, built by missionaries from Connecticut more than one hundred years earlier. Far enough off the main road to go unnoticed, and sheltered by a banyan tree, pines, and coconut palms stood a small, white house of worship, made of lava rock and stucco. From its wooden tower, the original missionary bell tolled every Sunday. Inside, light flooded through six large windows onto the white walls, unadorned except for one simple wooden cross and a few pewter sconces. Two chandeliers hung over the ten pews. Outside lay an old Hawaiian burial ground, with some new graves set among the palm trees. Beyond this shaded area, where the Pryors had already interred some of their apes, a pasture stretched to a high cliff that looked onto the Kipahulu Bay, white water crashing over a jagged mound of lava rock near the shore.

  Walking cliffward, at the center of that great sward, Lindbergh asked, “Who is over there?” Upon learning that the land was available, Lindbergh arranged with the state and church authorities to secure a thirty-foot-wide burial plot on that very spot. Lindbergh helped Pryor restore the church, and some days he could be seen clearing foliage from the neglected graveyard.

  Later that spring, Lindbergh suffered from an excruciating case of shingles, which limited his travels and cost him another ten pounds. His blood count low, flu and other minor maladies plagued him for months. He discouraged visitors, though he and Anne did entertain Imelda Marcos and Manda Elizalde at lunch one day in Darien. While he never completely recovered that year, he put up a good front, carrying on his essential business, sandwiching trips to his three houses.

  Anne f
inally got to spend more time with her husband. “This, of course, has a reaction on my life,” she wrote her sister, “because it virtually isolates me from the people I used to see when he went off…. What I have to face is a new and different un-balance in our relationship and in our life. And I must somehow learn how to right it … so that I am not either exhausted, or so frustrated that I lose my temper over minor and unrelated details, or so depressed because of the apparent monotony or sense of imprisonment, that I draw in to my shell & give up.” Months passed between diary entries. When she finally found a moment to catch up in her little “Cuckoo Clock chalet” above the main house in Switzerland, she wrote, “It has been a year of pressures & anxieties. ‘Alarms and excursions.’” Regular blood tests and additional biopsies suggested that the radiation had Lindbergh’s cancer in remission.

  His vitality never completely bounced back, but his appetite, weight, and spirit did. Into 1974, Lindbergh made one nonessential trip to Europe that year. In February, he met with J. Paul Getty at Sutton Place, the billionaire’s Tudor castle outside London, to garner extra publicity for the $50,000 Getty was donating to the World Wildlife Fund. That month, Lindbergh turned seventy-two, the mandatory retirement age from the Pan American Board of Directors. Although he was made an honorary member of the board, he was no longer obliged to make any trips anywhere.

  At the start of the year, the Lindberghs changed their legal residence from Connecticut to Hawaii. He planned future journeys—including the Midwestern Governors’ Conference in Minnesota and a tour of Brazil in July—but he traveled only to Maui, resting there four times by May. During that fourth visit, he and Sam Pryor and a Hawaiian named Joseph “Tevi” Kahaleuahi, a local bulldozer operator and builder, walked around the graveyard of the Ho’omau Congregational Church and marked a burial site with thick stakes and twine. Back in Darien, Lindbergh spoke of summering in Switzerland.

  On June second, however, he came down with a fever, which spiked to 104 degrees. Lindbergh checked into Harkness Pavilion and found himself bedridden for several days. After two weeks, he seemed strong enough to return home, but the doctors worried about their inability to correct his blood-count. He still did not want anybody to know how ill he was; and he forbade Anne from informing the children. By chance—“miracle from heaven,” wrote Anne—Jon showed up in New York on business mid-June. He insisted on seeing his father, whose condition could no longer be completely concealed.

  The “virus” that kept Lindbergh’s fever from breaking was, in fact, cancer that had invaded his lymphatic system, affecting the bone marrow, which produced “bad blood.” He began to respond well, however, to a new drug. After more than a month in the hospital, he was told he could go home and, with continued progress, on to Switzerland for the summer. On the third of July, he decided to take a “trial run,” by attending a Pan Am meeting midtown Manhattan. Starting out, he felt so good he thought of taking the subway—to save the cabfare. After the effort of walking from his hospital room down to Broadway, however, he hailed a taxi. The outing was enervating but successful. He began a course of chemotherapy and blood transfusions.

  Lindbergh returned to Tellina on Saturday, July seventh. It was brutally hot, and the trip home exhausted him. He slept most of the day, with a fever and chills. But he began improving every day after that, walking around the house, sitting on the terrace, eating and sleeping well. Jim Newton called from New York, and Charles invited him to supper, regaling his friend with tales of the Philippines until midnight.

  While the results of Lindbergh’s chemotherapy would not be immediate, those of the blood transfusions were. They stimulated him, and he was told he could have them as often as necessary. As he seemed to be on the rebound, the Lindbergh children were given the complete story of their father’s health, though Anne never spoke the name of his disease, euphemizing it as “the basic problem.”

  Despite the regular freshening of his blood supply, Lindbergh’s strength ebbed. After a few weeks of test results, it became obvious that “the basic problem” was worsening. He canceled his trip to Minnesota, and the possibility of going to Switzerland became more remote every day. On Wednesday, July twenty-fourth, he returned to the hospital, where the doctors told Anne they could no longer offer any hope of recovery. They would step up his chemotherapy, but they believed he could survive but a few weeks at most. Still fighting off the possibility of death, Lindbergh asked all sorts of medical questions. “It is as if the fire of the disease were raging in him, devouring him,” Anne confessed to the Reverend Mother at Regina Laudis. “Since his nature has always had so much of fire in it, this seems rather fitting.”

  Lindbergh’s children gathered around him, Ansy coming in from Paris, Reeve from Vermont. Land telephoned his younger brother in France; and though Scott was then suffering from hepatitis, he was prepared to visit if his father so wished. Thinking it would take a miracle for the two most stubborn members of the family ever to speak to each other again, Anne did everything in her powers to enable it. She prayed; and she suggested that Scott write a letter to his father first—“to make some kind of a bridge.” It did not have to be a long letter, she told him—any subject that might open a dialogue. Scott wrote at once, mostly about his work; but there was no mistaking the underlying purpose of his missive. “I am getting increasingly uncomfortable about the number of years that are collecting into the time that has passed since I last saw you,” he wrote. “… I’ve been all wrong in waiting for the problems to dissipate into a more or less distant past, in anticipating that my work would eventually create new levels on which we could get together. If lack of consideration and negligence are at the base of our differences, then what I’ve done, relegate our relationship to temporary oblivion, could only increase those differences.” Anne read the letter to Charles in the hospital, and he was visibly pleased.

  Scott immediately flew to New York and made his way to the Harkness Pavilion. Alone in Room 1148, he and his father talked for hours. “Charles has seemed so much happier … with this painful knot loosed,” Anne wrote from the hospital waiting room to a friend. “And it may save Scott’s life in the future. It would have been a hard burden to live with.” Anne shared the news of the reunion, and her husband’s condition, with his half-sister, Eva Lindbergh Christie Spaeth—from whom Charles had been estranged most of a lifetime. “Now they find they are alike much more deeply in thought and philosophy and work,” Anne wrote Eva on August tenth. “He feels his own thoughts and beliefs being continued in Scott’s work and writings. It makes him very happy and I am so grateful we have had this time for both of them.”

  Word leaked that Lindbergh was lying in the Intensive Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian, and well-wishing messages streamed in. Anne read him those she thought would please him most—from President Nixon, the DeWitt Wallaces, and Eva, who said she was “proud to know you are my brother.” Jim Newton flew to New York for a bedside visit. Lindbergh’s dear friend and publisher Bill Jovanovich closed a long letter by noting, “I am, as always, at your service and in your debt as your happy companion and unwavering friend. You have my good wishes, Charles, and my hope and my love, and that is the whole of it.”

  Over the next few days, Lindbergh accepted his fatal condition. On August fourteenth, he telephoned Jovanovich and said, “It is time we talked. Can you come to Columbia-Presbyterian?” When the publisher arrived, Lindbergh spoke to him about the book of memoirs he had been assembling over the years. He asked Jovanovich to read four hundred pages of manuscript to determine “whether it is any good and if it should be published.” Jovanovich read all night and returned to say that it was and it should be. Lindbergh then directed him to the brown leather bag in the hospital room, which contained half the pieces that would make up the final manuscript. Another thousand pages, he explained, were at Tellina or in his locked files at Yale. As instructed, Jovanovich drew up a contract and a letter to the Trustees of Yale in which Lindbergh’s wishes were spelled out, that Jovanovi
ch should serve as editor as well as publisher, that he should “establish a sequence” out of the sometimes unconnected pieces of manuscript, and that he should inform the reader that while the writing was all Lindbergh’s, “parts of the text were subject to editing consistent with his purpose.”

  Over the next two days, Lindbergh weakened visibly, though his voice grew stronger. On Friday, August sixteenth, he asked for a copy of his will, which he had amended the preceding year by removing Scott’s name as either a trustee or a beneficiary. He went through the fourteen-page document, and, in a discernibly feeble hand, printed Scott’s name five times, careting him back among his siblings. Later that day, he shook up everybody in the room with an extraordinary request. “I want to go home,” he said, turning to Anne, “—to Maui.”

  Most of the doctors would not hear of it. An argument could be made to let him return to Tellina, but Argonauta was out of the question. Dana Atchley understood the patient better than any of the others, however, and knew nobody would be able to change his thinking. He said he would sign him out of the hospital. They reached Dr. Milton Howell in Hawaii, who had discreetly assisted in treating Lindbergh’s condition over the past two years, and Lindbergh said to him, “Milton, I have eleven physicians here…. and they advise me that they aren’t going to be able to help me any more. I have eight to ten days to live, and I want to come back home to die. I’d rather spend two days alive on Maui than two months alive in this hospital here in New York City.”

  Howell tried to dissuade him, arguing that his doctors there knew his condition best and that he thought nobody would sign a certificate of fitness to travel. But Lindbergh’s mind was made up. He asked Howell to locate a house where he might spend his last days, one closer to the medical clinic in Hana than Argonauta. Howell arranged for Lindbergh to move into the guest cottage belonging to Jeannie and Edward Pechin, friends who had just left on a cruise to Alaska.