Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (16 page)

A
nne Morrow and her mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, 1929
.

(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

O
n New Year’s Eve, 960 people gathered at the Morrows’ new Englewood home.
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This was Betty’s house, the one that would erase the poverty of her childhood. Modeled on the Smith president’s house in Northampton, it had been designed by Delano and Aldrich, architects to the Rockefellers, the Lamonts, and the United States Government. It had been constructed by fine European craftsmen, who laid its brick, paneled its walls, secured its antique marble mantels, and set its sprawling stone floors and verandahs. After two years of construction, at a cost of $400,000, it was completed in the fall of 1928.
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Betty, the poor girl from Cleveland who had hated the drudgery of housework, was now the mistress of twenty-four servants, who swept her paths, cultivated her gardens, cleaned her floors, her crystal, and her silver, and drove her in her shiny black limousines. The schoolmaster’s son from the back streets of Pittsburgh had built her a home worthy of
her bargain. Betty had made the anglophilic life of the wealthy intelligentsia her own and had climbed Palisades Avenue into the hills.

This was a house fit for an ambassador’s wife, and this was a party beyond “her wildest hopes.” By seven-thirty “everybody” from Englewood and “crowds” from New York streamed down Lydecker Avenue toward the Morrow home. Twenty policemen steered the traffic while the guests walked through the iron gates and up the winding drive toward the crest of the eastern hill. Evening had fallen warm and dry, and the towering oaks, leafless against the winter sky, framed the fifty-two acres of woodlands and meadows around them. Rounding the curve, the guests walked down the slope into a courtyard sheltered by shrubs and gardens.
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The house, dubbed Next Day Hill,
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was a symmetrical red brick Georgian Colonial flanked by northern and southern wings, two stories high, with arched bay windows and a door on a huge stone pediment.

The guests entered the wood-paneled foyer and crossed its terracotta floor, through the French doors, and on to a brick-walled verandah. Hemlock wreaths, poinsettias, and Christmas trees lined its length, and a Mexican band played in the glass-enclosed piazza on its southern end. Flowers gushed from crystal vases which stood on mirrored mahogany stands, while accordions, guitars, and trumpets played, and white-gloved waiters passed ruby red sangria.

The crowd was as various as the professional and social circles of the Morrows’ twenty-five years of marriage. Pittsburgh and Cleveland mingled with Mexico and Wall Street, hometown teachers and lawyers brushed against New York money and diplomats. Betty’s sister Annie, Dwight’s sister Agnes, and his Amherst friend Charles Burnett chatted and laughed with Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, Great Britain’s Ambassador to Mexico, Esmond Ovey, and the wife of the late Woodrow Wilson.
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When the reception was over, sixty-nine people sat down to dinner at two tables, one hosted by Dwight and Betty, the other by Elisabeth and Anne. At the end of the meal, Betty spoke about her long-held dream to build the house, which germinated while she was still a student at Smith. Dwight, shining with pride, rose to toast his wife, praising
the life and home she had made. His only regret, he said to his family and friends, was that he had not obeyed Betty and built the house ten years earlier.
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As if inspired by her parents’ happiness, Anne danced the
jarabe
in the ballroom after dinner.
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To the sound of trumpets and the beat of maracas, her heels clicked and her red skirt twirled and her black, braided wig flew out behind her. At the end, Anne thrust her hat on the floor and danced triumphantly on its brim. The crowd broke into the Mexican anthem and a lively chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The timing of Anne’s dance seemed less than accidental. Charles Lindbergh was scheduled to arrive after dinner. The opulence and the joy of the celebration moved him. The wine, the food, the mahogany, and the silver again evoked memories of his childhood on the Mississippi and the life he and his parents had wanted and lost. This was the Morrow family at its best, choreographed with precision by Betty. During her year at the embassy, Betty had cultivated a style of her own—proper and sophisticated, interlaced with strands of Latin custom and culture. The soft sounds of a New England Christmas meshed with the brash cheer of a Mexican band.

Still flushed by her scarlet dance, Anne was ushered by Charles into an empty room. There, amid the faint sounds of Mexico, Charles asked for reassurance that she would marry him. Although they had told Anne’s parents of their betrothal, they did not yet want a public announcement. But because it was two months since their decision, Charles feared that Anne had doubts.

He was right. Despite Anne’s initial consent, she was unconvinced that either one of them was ready to marry. She had resigned herself to a conventional life; she wanted to write and she wanted to marry, but she wanted a husband who shared her interests, a man so close to her in “mind, spirit, and understanding,” he would feel like “home.”
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For the first time, she had met a man who understood her, and it was frightening. Charles saw the rebel heart inside the timid girl, and his piercing
eye both pleased and threatened her. She knew that, with Charles, her ambitions could run free and her deepest instincts would be valued. But she also knew that marriage to the “hero” would change her life forever, and there would be no turning back.

But why, she wondered, had her parents accepted her betrothal to Lindbergh when her own wishes had counted for nothing? Why as his appendage was she suddenly whole? Her doubts grew as much from fear as from confusion and the feeling that she simply had no choice.
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How could Anne refuse to marry Charles Lindbergh? Could she tell her parents that he didn’t read enough books? Could she justify a career in writing or teaching instead of being Lindbergh’s wife and co-pilot? And then there was his physical beauty, the beauty she could not stop thinking or writing about—his tall, muscular body, his sandy hair, which seemed to “laugh,” his hands and wrists, which burst with vitality. Most of all, it was the intensity of his eyes; they did not “seem his nor any man’s but as though many bright skies and clear horizons were behind them.”
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The Morrows had not been surprised by Lindbergh’s proposal. It was Anne’s indecision that bewildered them. They took their usual January vacation in Nassau and, on its white beaches, had weighed the prospect of Anne’s marriage to Charles. Anne and Elisabeth sat in the sun, eating tomato sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise, and talking incessantly of love and heroes. Elisabeth took a maternal view of Anne’s soul-baring honesty, feeling at once the intensity of her confusion and wondering when she would have the courage to make up her mind.
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It may have puzzled Anne that Elisabeth wasn’t jealous. Perhaps, for the first time, Elisabeth confided the depth of her feelings for Connie, and Anne understood Elisabeth’s need to pull away.

While Anne wallowed in indecision, Lindbergh held to a clever strategy. He kept his silence and did not call or write, leaving Anne to deal alone with her uncertainty. As a result, she missed him twice as much.
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In January 1929 the Morrow family had other concerns. Dwight
Morrow’s political ambitions were thwarted by President Herbert Hoover’s unwillingness to appoint him secretary of state. Hoover feared that if Mellon were secretary of the treasury and Morrow secretary of state, his administration would be viewed as “big business government.” The matter was explained in the press as Mexico’s continuing need for Morrow in a time of crisis, but the truth behind his failure to obtain the appointment slowly surfaced.
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Suddenly, in the midst of the publicity, the Morrows received a call from the headmaster of Groton. Dwight Jr. had had another breakdown.
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Immediately, Betty and Dwight took the train to New York and set off in their private car for Pittsfield, Massachusetts. On January 30 they rode twelve miles in subzero weather to Stockbridge, where Dwight had been taken to a rest home.
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Once again, Dwight Jr.’s illness held Betty and Dwight hostage. They lived as though the events of their lives were disconnected from the mental torture of their son. Yet the emotional instability of Dwight Jr. served as a barometer to the pressures in their lives. Anne’s betrothal to Charles Lindbergh and Morrow’s ascendance in the political arena exacerbated Dwight Jr.’s conflicts. Behind the scenes, he played ragtime to their melody, forcing his parents to appraise their vulnerability—to reflect on both their standards and their ambition. Morrow’s letters to his son during the following months alternated between endearing words of encouragement and grim lectures on moral conduct, obviating the possibility of true emotional exchange. To Morrow, virtue and sanity were the same—a moral debt owed to ourselves, our friends, the community, and God. Like a preacher shaking his finger at his wayward flock, he listed the hallmarks of a virtuous life: self-restraint, knowledge, integrity, courage, and excellence within the limits of one’s ability.
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Anne too had a debt to pay. She had kept Lindbergh waiting another month. As if her decision were nothing less than a gift, on February 3, one day before Lindbergh’s twenty-seventh birthday, Anne gave her consent. In the end, logic and reason meant nothing; preconception and fear slipped away. All that remained was her love for Charles. Never had
she met anyone “so fine, so clear, so utterly good, so real.”
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Their marriage was a matter of fate.

Anne had wanted a quiet intellectual life, unlike her parents’ fast-moving pace. But now she was doomed to follow Lindbergh across the continents of time and space. She wrote to her friend Corliss Lamont: “Don’t wish me happiness … Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor—I will need them all.”
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Released from the grip of indecision, Anne was suddenly eager to give the “news to the world.” Nine days later, Dwight Morrow announced from his private office at the embassy in Mexico the engagement of Anne Spencer Morrow to Charles Augustus Lindbergh.
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The notice was handed to foreign correspondents and disseminated to newspapers throughout the world.

In the left-hand column of the first page of the
New York Times
, upstaging the 280,000 people who had congregated in St. Peter’s Square to pay homage to the Pope, the headline read:
COLONEL LINDBERGH BETROTHED TO MISS ANNE S. MORROW
.
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The announcement of the engagement surprised some, inspired others, and elicited global expressions of congratulations. Lindbergh’s friends in St. Louis were stunned. “Girls,” they said, “had never interested ‘Slim.’”
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But if his social reluctance seemed odd to his colleagues, it was the stuff of royalty to the foreign eye. The United States minister to Canada, William Phillips, saw Lindbergh’s social restraint as a princely virtue: “Colonel Lindbergh occupies a perfectly unique position in our country, very much like the Prince of Wales in Great Britain and Canada, because he represents to us, as does the Prince of Wales to you, all that is finest in man.”
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The public response to Lindbergh’s choice as bride was uniform and unequivocal. Anne Morrow was portrayed as the perfect mate for the perfect hero. She was “proper” in demeanor, newspapers wrote, “moderate” in taste and inclination, “beautiful,” and “demure.”

The
New York Times
reported that Anne was the Morrows’ “second daughter,” that she was Presbyterian, “like her father and her family,” and
that she had a commitment to both academic study and domesticity.
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It added that she was a good student without being “a grind”
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and, though she was not athletic, she conformed to notions of “prudent” activity.

This “sweet, quiet, and attractive girl,” it stated, was slender; her luxuriant brown hair framed “very large and pansy-colored” eyes. Furthermore, she was a brilliant, prize-winning authoress.
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Restrained yet ambitious, intelligent yet beautiful, Anne was the epitome of Victorian womanhood, the consummate bride for the consummate man. For the moment, in the midst of public acclaim, Anne was transformed. To her family, Anne looked more radiant and beautiful than ever.
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But she was already paying a price for her decision to marry the boy-hero who conducted his life like a fishing trip. For ten days, she sat alone in the embassy without so much as a word from Charles. Daily, the servants brought her the newspapers that reported his itinerary, his whereabouts, and his safety.
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Anne’s fears had come to pass. She had lost control of her life. Betrothed to the Prince, she had become his handmaiden, obediently awaiting his return.