Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (5 page)

Our first meeting in Vevey, Switzerland, on a warm August afternoon still holds the thrill of reunion with a friend I knew so little and yet so well. As I emerged from the tunnel of the train station, I waved to Anne excitedly, but of course she did not recognize me. We entered a small gray car, and Anne drove. I was surprised by her confidence at the wheel. How difficult to see this frail woman in a white cotton sweater as the girl who had blazed uncharted routes to places where no
woman had ever been. In my mind, I stripped the veneer of her aged skin to seek, once again, the smooth-faced girl.

The road narrowed into a driveway, and we chugged slowly up an incline. To an American unschooled in the nuances of Swiss architecture, the chalet looked like a cottage, like so many found in the woods of rural New York. It was a modest A-frame, deep reddish-brown, and unadorned, except for a few flower pots that hung from the balcony like beads on a summer necklace.

We walked up the narrow stone steps to the main room, which was both kitchen and living space, opening on a balcony overlooking the mountains. She was proud of this house. Charles had called it Anne’s Chalet.

Anne served a generous lunch: meat, cheese, dark bread with raw mountain butter, and salad. As we passed the salad and the bread, the conversation turned personal, with Anne skillfully orchestrating it. Yet beneath the placid surface of Anne’s talk was a relentless and piercing scrutiny. I had been warned of her intensity, of her finely tuned antennae hidden beneath her gentility and reserve. She scanned my face and hands, examined my jewelry and my clothes for traces of falsity and indiscretion. She probed my eyes to seek my intent.

“I learned a lot about you,” she said as we sat after lunch on the balcony.

I did not question her. I had passed a test.

A
s she spoke, she removed her dark glasses and I saw for the first time her violet, almond-shaped eyes. She leaned back into the worn, plastic-flowered chaise, looking up, unfocused, at the sky, as though seeking divine acknowledgment. She gazed at the hillside and the mountains, commenting on the birds as they fed at her window, enthralled by their beauty and by the intricacies of their play. They connected her, she said, to the “great forces of nature;” they renewed her energy and reasserted the creative essence of the universe. In this setting, amid the unshorn trees, the cowbells, and the mountains, she seemed strong and lucid, confident and proud of her ability to think and to remember.

Because she knew few strangers, she spoke to me as a friend, relieved, even grateful to unburden her thoughts. In spite of her reticence, she loved to talk. Slowly, our conversation began to take shape.

I spoke of her books; Anne spoke of Charles.

I spoke of her poetry; Anne spoke of Charles.

I spoke of her father; Anne spoke of Charles.

“I want to set the record straight,” she finally said. “That’s all I have left of him.”

Her monologue seemed to hang in space—bold and unadorned. It was as though she were renouncing something old and dear; as though she knew it was time to confront the inevitable. Her face grew soft as her words changed fragments of memory into a story.

“My life began when I met Charles Lindbergh.”

Charles Lindbergh on the steps of the American Embassy in Mexico City, December 1927
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(Amherst College Archives)

I
t was nearly noon, and Colonel Lindbergh was late. Thousands of people lined the broad airfield, flooding the valley between the snow-covered mountains with a frenzied rush of sound and color. It was as if all of Mexico had gathered for the spectacle: men in overalls, their serapes pulled tight against the chill morning air, women in brightly colored shawls, and children kicking gaily in the dust. They had trudged the roads before dawn, only to wait for hours in the midday sun. Worn by heat and delay, the crowd loosened and fragmented. Once stiff with expectation, the people settled into a carnival mood, making the soldiers who paced the lines twitch with uncertainty. Anything could happen with a crowd this size; its energy unleashed could easily turn destructive. When Lindbergh had arrived in Paris after his transatlantic flight only seven months earlier, the crowd had surged toward him, mauling his plane in a wild stampede.
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United States Ambassador Dwight Morrow waited impatiently. A lot was riding on Lindbergh’s safe arrival, and Morrow was not one to take disappointment lightly. At fifty-four, he was an accomplished lawyer and a Wall Street millionaire, but he was new to Mexico, this “cemetery” of political reputations, and he had much to prove.

Standing five feet four inches tall, Dwight Morrow was less than imposing. Dressed like a banker in a three-piece pinstripe suit, in spite of the heat, he posed for the cameras, fumbled with his glasses and smiled nervously at the press. His clothes, as usual, fit poorly; this time they seemed to swallow him whole. His large head, topped by a blue fedora, rested on the edge of a thickly starched collar, and his trousers bagged shapelessly over his shoes. He was a Chaplinesque figure, a parody of a gentleman, like a poor man dressed in a rich man’s clothes. His body looked like an uninvited guest, self-indulgently diverting the issues at hand.
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The issues at hand were heavy indeed. Mexico and the United States were on the brink of war. The Mexican government, wracked with internecine struggle and hopelessly in debt, had threatened to nationalize American oil companies. The business community was up in arms, and diplomatic relations were at their ebb. President Calvin Coolidge had concluded it meant sending in Morrow or the U.S. Marines.
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While Coolidge worried that Morrow’s connection to J. P. Morgan would link him to American business interests, he banked on his pristine style and reputation. Morrow could outreason and outquote any lawyer around. He could preach the Bible and bore his listeners with Thucydides, but his true gift lay in the realm of compromise. Resisting the taint of marketplace pragmatism, Morrow decided that his mission was to compose differences, as a conductor might orchestrate a melody or a tune. The plain truth was that he was a master of deals.

Rigorously trained in mathematics by his father, Dwight believed in the morality of logic. James Elmore Morrow, a fundamentalist Presbyterian of Scottish-Irish descent, had taught his precocious second-born son the art and method of systematic thought. Relentlessly, as though it were the very stuff of salvation, he had drilled his boy in mathematics and syllogism, along with the hundred and seven questions of the Presbyterian catechism. Logic, James believed, was intrinsic to ethics—the outward manifestation of God’s ordinance, no less binding than prayer and church. It made one deal with realities rather than appearances and put the burden of proof on the inquirer. Dwight dealt with issues, not with men. He could make wrathful negotiators
talk as if they were comrades, yet have each side think it was outwitting the other. It was a gift that his partners at J. P. Morgan and Company had deemed priceless.

And this priceless gift had earned him a fortune. When he left Morgan, only two months earlier, after fourteen years as its chief counsel, he was a full partner, earning more than a million dollars a year. Now, his money permitted him the luxury of public service—his dream since he had been a law clerk at the age of twenty-two. Money, he believed, turned dreamers into men of action, allowing them to participate in history. It wasn’t that he wanted to be rich; he just didn’t want to be poor. His father’s inability to earn a good salary was underlined by his mother’s obvious disappointment. Although Clara Morrow, a Campbellite fundamentalist Presbyterian,
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considered it natural to submit to her husband, she made plain that she preferred “bonnets” to books. Wishing to please his mother, Dwight imagined himself a “dragon-slayer,” bringing home the spoils of his conquest. It was a fantasy he would often need to replay.
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While some saw him as a man of ruthless ambition, each career move, in fact, caused him anguish. He saw himself as a statesman—a philosopher king—removed from the rabble of the political arena. He served God by serving the community, certain that his good works would place him among the elect.
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Yet he felt guilty about his money, as if he were a renegade academic seduced by the pleasures of commerce and status. He was a reluctant Horatio Alger hero who would have rather been an Abraham Lincoln.

Perched high on the flag-draped grandstand above the field, scanning the horizon for Lindbergh’s plane, Morrow’s tiny figure beside the robust presence of Mexican President Plutarco Calles was a reminder of the chasm between the two men. The twelfth president in the seventeen years since the revolution, Calles was a clever politician, a Machiavellian leader cloaking his aims in the rhetoric of nationalism and peace. His enemies called him an “iron man,” no less a despot than the man he had ousted. But in these weeks preceding the election, he had gone too far, murdering his competitors and their supporters to
clear the way for his nationalist party. For all his bravado, revolution seemed imminent; he could no longer rely on the loyalty of the army.

Dark-eyed and grim behind his close-cropped mustache, President Calles looked nervously at his watch. He had been up all night, calling his staff for news of Lindbergh’s flight. The bloody events of the last few weeks had imbued everything, even this midweek master stroke of public relations, with bitter irony. Charles Lindbergh’s arrival would be a humbling reminder of Calles’s dependence on American money. If he were to survive, he would need the good will of the American government and some old-fashioned Yankee theater.

Suddenly, the sky roared. Five escort planes, zooming in formation, dazzled the crowd like a jolt of electricity. People jumped to their feet, pointing and shouting at the approaching aircraft.

Morrow was relieved. The flight, after all, had been his idea. With no air routes or radios to guide a pilot, even the best could go down. There were fears that Lindbergh had cracked up; that his motor had failed him in one of the rocky districts where no plane could land safely. Morrow had tried to dissuade Lindbergh from making a nonstop flight from Washington, but Lindbergh had been adamant. If his flight connected the nations’ capitals, it would have greater political significance, Lindbergh said, especially by drawing the attention of Congress.
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Morrow, who had met Lindbergh at the White House a few months earlier, quickly learned that he was no backwoods farm boy.
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Born to a line of skillful politicians, Lindbergh understood Washington, understood Congress, and understood the power and whim of public opinion. His paternal grandfather, Ola Månsson, had been one of the few land-holding peasants in Sweden to serve in the Riksdag. Although his was a voice of social reform, Månsson blatantly abused his position. As an officer of a Malmö bank with connections to government officials, he was accused of bribery and embezzlement. In 1859, to escape imprisonment, Månsson changed his name to August Lindbergh,
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left his wife and seven children, and fled to America with his nineteen-year-old mistress, Louisa Carline, and their illegitimate son, Charles, to begin a new life in central Minnesota.
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Bypassing the fertile prairies of the Swedish colonies, the Lindberghs bought a hundred and sixty acres of woodlands and pasture in Melrose, Minnesota, a new community of German immigrants. While August tilled the land to grow oats and wheat, and set up a blacksmith shop a mile outside town, his peasant-girl wife tended her baby and worked in the fields. Lonely and despairing of their future, Louisa, in her rosebud bonnets, milked the cows and pined for home, family, and Sweden.
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With time, the farm prospered, and their handwrought sod hut was transformed into the biggest frame house in the county. Still an outspoken agent of reform, Lindbergh was appointed postmaster and village secretary and, later, clerk of school districts and justice of the peace. When the four children born to him and Louisa were grown, he married her secretly in the town church and put the scandals of Sweden behind him. But, as if in mourning for something forever lost, Louisa wore a black dress beneath her kitchen apron all her life.