Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (45 page)

A
nne, Charles, and Jon arrive in Liverpool, England, December 1935
.

(Popperfoto)

I
n the early morning hours of December 22, 1935, the Lindberghs slipped quietly out to sea on a freighter bound for England. Standing bareheaded on the deck, Charles saluted the Statue of Liberty as they navigated the inland waters toward the open sea.
¹
With a sense of betrayal as passionate as his Swedish grandfather’s nearly eighty years earlier, Charles was crossing back to Europe in the hope of anonymity and peace.

At strict orders from Charles, the ship was empty, and no one came to say good-bye.
²
Betty Morrow and Con had waved to them from the big front door as their limousine disappeared around the curve down Next Day Hill. Arriving at the dock on Manhattan’s West Side, they registered under assumed names and presented diplomatic passports. Even the crew didn’t know who their only passengers were.

Christmas at sea would be lonely, but it would also be free from fear for the first time since the children were born. As Anne walked with Jon up the gangplank toward the forward deck and down through the darkened halls to their stateroom, she was tired and apprehensive but pleased with their decision.

She had felt rootless since leaving Hopewell. The lack of privacy at Englewood, the publicity surrounding the trial, and the efforts of the New Jersey governor to commute Hauptmann’s death sentence had created an atmosphere of hostility.
³
“It was as though the Lindbergh family were living alone on a frontier, their home surrounded by savages,” commented the
Times
.

On their second day at sea, amid the roar of wind and rain, Anne noted in her diary that their hasty exit had made quite a “splash.” It was “rather shocking,” she wrote, but it was as if, by their own hand, the American people had forced the exile of their native son.
⁴
While the Lindberghs blamed their departure on the intrusions and distortions of the press, the press was divided against itself, blaming its lowly tabloid brethren for pushing the Lindberghs to desperation. But not even the most self-righteous newspapers had resisted the Lindberghs’ story. Front pages were filled with sensationalized versions of the facts, even as the editors preached holy abstinence. The
Christian Science Monitor
wrote that “newspapers more than kidnappers have exiled the Lindberghs,” and
Time
magazine added that long ago “the Press at large concluded that Hero Lindbergh’s real Herod was yellow journalism.”
⁵
The cannibalization of the Lindberghs by the press reached the absurd when Viscount Rothermere printed an editorial, in the London
Daily Mirror
, entitled “Leave Them Alone” while simultaneously covering his front page with news of the Lindberghs’ crossing.
⁶

But the public searched for deeper reasons. On Christmas Day, there was an outcry in the United States against the “alien” and “criminal” elements responsible for the “outrage” of the Lindberghs’ departure for England. Bruno Richard Hauptmann had become the xenophobes’ symbol of the inferior, uneducated, and morally bankrupt “aliens” who had flooded the American cities at the turn of the century; to the eugenics movement, the Lindberghs were martyrs. Ironically, the public did not know that Charles was the grandson of a Swedish immigrant who had been a convicted felon and a fugitive from the law.

While the English public thrilled to the prospect of the Lindberghs’ arrival, observers saw little to suggest that life in England would offer them much consolation. “It reminds one somewhat of the frog who dived into the pond to avoid getting wet in the rain,” wrote a satirist for the Paris
Oeuvre.
⁷
He couldn’t see how the Lindbergh child could be any more secure in England than in the States. The frequency of child abduction was as high in England as in America, he wrote.

In fact, that was not true. During the preceding two years, there had
been sixty-three kidnappings in America; in England there had been four, according to public record.
⁸
Furthermore, there was no complicated process of appeal in England. Criminals were punished swiftly and severely, by imprisonment or by hanging.
⁹

As the storms at sea raged, and little Jon grew paler and more seasick each day, Anne cared for him with an intensity she had never achieved at home. Wholly responsible for Jon while Charles conferred and dined with the ship’s captain, Anne’s priorities were instantly rearranged. Suddenly, her anxiety became academic. Concentrating on the routine tasks of tending to Jon, she had no time to contemplate her writing. When a wave crashed through the window, threatening Jon with an “impersonal force” like the one that had overtaken Charlie, Anne wrote, “How could I have longed for anything else? Let me get safely there.”
¹⁰

In the stealth of the night, two weeks later, their ship lurched toward the docks of Liverpool on the Mersey River. The next morning, amid the pop of flashbulbs and the shouted queries of the British press, the Lindberghs stood on the deck in the rain while a platoon of bobbies hastily carved a lane through the waiting throng.
¹¹
With Jon shielded in Charles’s arms, the Lindberghs, smiling wanly, passed through the protective lines of the British police into their waiting limousine. They spent the afternoon in a local hotel, and then, under cover of darkness, drove to the childhood home of Aubrey Morgan, in the small country town of Llandaff, near Cardiff.
¹²

Even though every newspaper in London ran the story of their arrival on its front page, once they were at the Morgan home, it was as if they had disappeared. Finally, they had earned the privacy they deserved.

Anne wrote to her mother-in-law that she felt safe in “this quiet garden.”
¹³
At night she wasn’t afraid to put Jon to bed and felt no compulsion to check his breathing.

But all too soon, Anne found she had traded safety for ennui. The status of the Morgan family could protect her from the public but not from the realities of middle-class motherhood. Without a home of her
own, without domestic help and the leisure to write, Anne grew lonely, bored, and restless. She felt like a “flat-footed, red-nosed, and dowdy governess,” unable to think, read, or even talk.
¹⁴
It was not a question of time, she wrote; it was a question of being disconnected from the world beyond the nursery.
¹⁵

Again, she played games with herself, fighting despair by forcing her thoughts through the open branches of the oak trees into the effortless glide of the seagulls in the sky. Discouraged, she wondered whether her ability to write had been no more than an illusion she would now have to discard for the hard-edged realities of British domestic life. The lack of privacy, the consuming demands of Jon, and the conversation of the women she met in the suburbs of Cardiff made her sharply aware of the extraordinary quality of the life she was seeking. As consolation, friends of the Morgans gave her a book outlining the proprieties and responsibilities of English motherhood. Dutifully, Anne noted the advice in her diary: The gifts of women were lesser than those of men, in spite of their claims to equality. Rather than pretend she had something to contribute to society at large, a woman should stay at home with her “real masterpiece,” her son. “I feel confident that her soup will be better than her poetry,” the author concluded.
¹⁶

To be a mother in England in 1936, that is, to bear and rear a male child, was to personify Christian values. Given the limited quality of her intellect, a woman’s only “sane” solution was to dedicate her life to motherhood and housewifery.

What Anne sensed, but could not confirm, was that British attitudes toward women in the 1930s was a backlash against their full participation in public service, industry, and government during the First World War. Once the war was over, government, mirroring public opinion, provided incentives to lure women back to their homes, where they could fulfill their “natural” roles as wives and mothers. Dubbed “hussies” and “dole-scroungers” by men whose jobs were “stolen,” the women who persisted in working in the open market were discouraged by national insurance and dole legislation, which sought to ease them out of the workplace. Working-class girls were educated in domestic
skills, meant to be practiced not only in their homes, but as servants in the homes of the wealthy. The new women’s magazines presented the shining ideal of the stay-at-home housewife, groomed to bear and educate a new generation of children, and thus make up for the ravages of war.

The feminist ideal did not extend much beyond the notion of suffrage. After 1928, when women were enfranchised, a complacency seemed to take hold, especially among younger women. To them, the battle for freedom had been won, and there was no longer a need for concerted action in the public arena. In 1936, as the Depression became more severe and the threat of war nearly palpable, the issue of women’s rights seemed narrow. Women worked within the established social and political structure to deal with the exigencies of public need and foreign policy.
¹⁷
It was not surprising that Anne felt pangs of guilt and self-indulgence. A privileged and educated American woman, whose peers had confirmed her ambitions in spite of her own doubts, she found life in Wales reactionary and constrained. She was trapped in a life she had not chosen, and longed again for the independence she had had as a college girl. In her diary, she noted that she was still “Mother’s little girl, Daddy’s little daughter, C.’s little wife.”
¹⁸
Her long struggle to define herself as a writer now seemed to have come to naught.

She hid her feelings from Charles; she no longer had the luxury of alienating him. Isolated and alone, needing his approval more than ever, Anne told Charles what he wanted to hear. She did not yearn for anything but a home, she said—a home, anywhere, with him and Jon.
¹⁹

Back in the States, Con was learning that fighting against prevailing social expectation was a difficult task, even in the company of like-minded peers. Suddenly pretty and sure of herself, after graduating
summa cum laude
from Smith in 1935, Con had moved to Vermont with Margot Loines, intent on pursuing a career in the theater. Once back at home, she was thrust into the company of Aubrey Morgan, whose grief in the wake of Elisabeth’s death had inspired her compassion.
²⁰
Aubrey, nine years older and sophisticated in business and travel, had chaperoned Con and her mother the following summer on a tour of Europe. It
was there, while Betty Morrow slept, that Aubrey and Con, talking into the morning hours, had fallen in love. Now they announced their plans to marry.

Anne was shocked. The pieces didn’t fit. Wouldn’t their marriage somehow diminish Elisabeth? She had appeared to Anne like a painted portrait, and now her fears were coming to pass—Elisabeth was lost forever behind a “glaze” of memory.
²¹