Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (7 page)

Within the first week after his flight, Lindbergh had received $5 million of commercial offers—books, records, cosmetics, clothing, cigarettes, furniture, movies. Scores of popular songs and hundreds of poems had been written about his flight. And while Lindbergh would soon grow tired of the sound and touch of the crowd, it was clear that, in spite of his sincere humility, he enjoyed the public adulation.

Dwight Morrow had met Lindbergh by chance on the day of his arrival home from England. When Lindbergh’s ship, the
Memphis
, sailed into port in Virginia, Morrow, head of the newly formed Aircraft Board, was having lunch with President Coolidge.
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Lindbergh arrived at the presidential mansion, and the magnetism between the two men was immediate. Standing six feet two inches tall, the lean, beautiful flyer was everything Morrow had wanted to be—the dragon-slaying man of action, courage, and moral rectitude. The small, Bible-quoting philosopher with his pants too long would see Lindbergh as a conquering prince whose confidence came from a place so deep that it seemed to redefine the meaning of virtue.

Seeing, as well, the naïveté of his own youth in this ambitious young man, Morrow had a paternal desire to embrace him. He recruited twenty-two of his J. P. Morgan associates to raise $10,500 to pay Lindbergh’s St. Louis debts, and offered his services as financial adviser to invest the young man’s rapidly accumulating wealth. For all Lindbergh’s courage and extraordinary competence, he struck Morrow as a bit of a waif. He was certain that Lindbergh, despite his well-honed political instincts, did not have the street knowledge to match his new fast-paced, media-hounded life.

Lindbergh was grateful. Unlike the other men who were riding his
coattails, Morrow was warm, genuine, and protective. As self-appointed liaison between Charles and the financial community, Morrow shielded him from the strain of public demand. When Morrow was appointed ambassador to Mexico, Lindbergh asked him if he could be of help. Morrow quickly replied, “A little flying in Latin-America … would be a fine adventure.”
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Once again, Morrow’s political instincts were sharp; Lindbergh’s flight was exactly what he needed to assuage American dissension with the Calles regime. It was the perfect confluence of three men and their causes, wrapped and sealed in one glorious metaphor. For President Calles, Lindbergh’s flight was a seductive distraction, a grand illusion of peace and reconciliation. For Morrow, Lindbergh’s presence offered credibility and clout. For Lindbergh, it was a chance to fly, long and fast, for the second time, and to prove the viability of commercial air-flight.

T
he escort planes disappeared over the mountains, and a dead silence enveloped the crowd. Suddenly, a soldier pushed through the lines and ran to the grandstand. President Calles listened to him, then rose to the microphone. The sighting had been false, he said. What had passed was an oil plane. There was no sign of the
Spirit of St. Louis
. He begged their patience.

Dwight’s wife, Elizabeth Morrow, felt she had been patient long enough.
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She was hot, hungry, and tired of exchanging pleasantries with the president. Small and birdlike, Betty, as she was called, had a delicacy that belied the force of her will. Prim and voguish in her cloche hat and caped navy dress, she appeared more like a clubwoman awaiting her butler than a dignitary about to meet an aviator-hero in the godforsaken dustbowl of a tropical airfield. With perfect composure, she chatted with Mrs. Weddell, wife of the British foreign minister, who served her a proper English lunch of sandwiches and lemonade from her hand-woven, neatly packed picnic basket.

If Betty shared her husband’s impatience, she did not share his distress. For her, Lindbergh’s flight was theater at its best. She loved embassy
life—the costume and the ritual, the deference and the decorum. Except for the heat, she might have relished the drama of Lindbergh’s late entrance, which made the prospect of meeting him that much sweeter.

All the years of struggle and waiting for the right post for Dwight had finally come to fruition. Like Dwight, she had a thirst for status and wealth which rose from fundamentalist roots. Wealth was the crown of a virtuous life, and she too had known the sting of poverty. As the eldest daughter of a ne’er-do-well lawyer, she had fought like a general in an all-out war to leave Cleveland, Ohio, and her mother’s domestic “slavery.” She had primed herself for upper-crust society, earning a degree at Smith College, wanting not only prestigious credentials, but the chance for financial independence. Marriage to a schoolmaster’s unpolished son may have been a capitulation, but her failure at a literary career and the eight years served as the functional head of her downtrodden family had brought her to the brink of desperation. The family’s dependence on her good-natured competence had become a burden and a social liability. It was now clear that Dwight Morrow was going places, and that her own ambition would amount to nothing. Morrow’s determination and his desire to please her was a reasonable bargain for a woman of nearly thirty who was feeling the smart of spinsterhood. And the brash Mr. Morrow had not let her down. By the time she turned forty, she was living the comfortable and well-connected life of a suburban New Jersey matron. With maids to tend her house and nannies for her children, she filled her days with the “municipal housekeeping” of a female philanthropist.

At first she had objected to Dwight’s Mexican assignment, calling it a “penny whistle” post, a trinket tossed to a whining child. She had hoped for Britain or, at the very least, France. But the Mexican people had taken her by surprise. She hadn’t been prepared for the opulence and the grandeur of the American Embassy or for the generosity and reverence of the people who served them. She wrote to her daughter Anne at Smith College that she had fourteen servants who didn’t permit her “to lift a pin.” It was a long way from Cleveland and her mother’s middle-class, threadbare drudgery.

But the sweet excitement of embassy life had its price. While their youngest child, Constance, sturdy and confident, traveled with them, Betty worried about her three older children. Elisabeth, the eldest, had recently graduated from Smith and was teaching at a Montessori school at home in Englewood, New Jersey. Anne was a senior at Smith; Dwight Jr. was a freshman at Groton.

Betty had been apart from her children before, but never for so long and never with so much uncertainty. Anne had written her not to worry about her children, that her responsibility to her father in Mexico was paramount. But Betty sensed that old patterns were breaking. In spite of the fact that Betty and Dwight had been moving toward this moment for twenty-five years, Dwight’s appointment to Mexico somehow took them by surprise. Betty feared that they were losing touch with ordinary life, that they were paying a price for their status and pleasure.

Lindbergh’s impending arrival made her eldest daughter’s absence particularly painful. Elisabeth would have been a comfort to Betty. So easy with people, so poised and confident, Elisabeth was nothing like Betty at that age and everything she had wanted to be.
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She was a bit of a miracle, after all the self-doubt Betty had known. Blond, long-legged, filled with vitality in spite of a weak heart, Elisabeth was self-possessed and in control. She would make a perfect match for “the beautiful young Colonel,” and Betty was pleased that Lindbergh’s arrival coincided with Elisabeth’s impending visit for the Christmas holiday.

Anne, the Morrows’ “second daughter,” was to accompany Elisabeth. She, however, was cause for worry. More like a Morrow—small, brainy, brown-haired—Anne seemed vulnerable, like a bird you could frighten away by a wrong move or the slant of an eye. She was pretty enough, lithe and graceful, with violet-blue eyes, soft wavy hair, and, when she wasn’t trying to hide it, a full lovely figure. But she was slow and tentative, almost apologetic for her presence.
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She played the role of invisible observer, skirting a room with downcast eyes, sheathing herself in her own flesh. At times she cultivated her shyness, using it to keep others at a distance. Her acute sensitivity and solitary bent were far different from Betty’s gregarious nature. Betty and Elisabeth were usually in harmony,
but Betty and Anne seemed at odds. Even as a child, Anne had played at the edge, posturing conformity while flouting her mother’s rules. When Anne made it clear that she wanted to go to Vassar instead of Smith, Betty felt her foundations shaking. Anne had capitulated like a good little girl, but the tension between them remained.

Dwight Jr., however, was the most fragile of all. Born on the eve of Morrow’s entry into international finance, he was the only son and the heir apparent to Morrow’s ambition, but he had been sickly from the start. As an infant he had suffered from a digestive disorder that left him malnourished and frail, and in spite of his strong intelligence, his natural athletic gifts, and handsome, chiseled face, he had been plagued by physical and mental illness.
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Betty made excuses. He was a genius like his father and his grandfather before him. That explained his weak nerves and delicate constitution; of course he broke down now and then. How could a genius survive in this imperfect world?
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If he could only relax and take things as they came. Betty was relieved that he wasn’t in Mexico now. The long trip and the attendant publicity would have been a terrible strain on his nerves. By the time he and the girls came for the Christmas holiday the following week, the tumult would be over. Until then, she and precocious “little Con” would entertain the famous young Colonel.

L
indbergh was two hours late, and there was still no sign. All of Mexico, said one observer, was holding its breath.

America’s Viking of the Air had taken off at Bolling Field, in Washington, D.C., under the cover of low-hanging clouds that promised to follow him straight to Mexico. As he had prepared the
Spirit of St. Louis
for the second time to cross thousands of miles of uncharted territory, there had been no crowds, none of the drama of the transatlantic flight. Those who observed his businesslike attention to the last details of preparation felt that his intense efficiency had robbed them of the thrill of his impending departure. He was slow and meticulous, but as the weather began to clear, he had quickened his pace. When he emerged from the hangar, he was seen to have changed from
his business attire into the brown leather jumpsuit that had become his uniform. The earflaps of his aviator’s hood dangled at his chin, and a pair of goggles was pushed back from his forehead.

He moved toward the plane, and the cameramen crept closer and closer, encircling him like small black spiders with their tripods and hoods. Afraid that he might injure them as he taxied the plane to the runway, he yelled to them to move away. “If you play ball with me, I’ll treat you fair. If you don’t, I’ll turn the other way.”

The cameramen moved back, and Lindbergh, carrying three meat sandwiches and two quarts of water meant to last him over twenty-one hundred miles, prepared to climb into the plane.

“Wave to us!” the photographers shouted. Lindbergh, his face calm and serious, posed obligingly as he stepped into the “big machine.”

The long flight to Mexico City was a welcome relief after months of pit stops across the states, preaching airplane safety to skeptical crowds. He had visited eighty-two cities and flown twenty-two thousand miles, making speeches, attending dinners, and marching in parades. Now, the tropical air would rest and stretch his mind, bringing him into a sensual contact with the terrain below. For a few hours there would be no hounding by the press nor demands of petty social necessities that had beleagured him in the preceding months.
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He believed that flying posed little danger to one who was prepared. Even if there was danger, the nearness of death excited him—focusing, even purifying, his every thought and action—so that it was like living at the crux of life and death. The beauty and freedom of flight were worth more than anything he had known on the ground below. He would rather be killed in a crash than live the “antlike days” of a frightened spectator.
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The crowds no longer bothered him as much. Nothing could be as bad as it had been in London and Paris. Most amusing were the women—so fawning and silly, always trying to impress him. He, who had found women to be a problem all his life, was now the most coveted man in the world. He received hundreds of letters from female admirers, declaring their love and proposing marriage to the Prince of the
Air. Girls were everywhere, and for the first time he knew he could have his pick. Lindbergh had never liked to date; he hated the small talk and the pretense. His childhood had taught him that intimacy meant pain. Abandonment and suffocation—the two ends of the emotional spectrum—were integral to his notions of love and marriage. He felt in control only when he was alone. Yet in recent months he had begun observing young women more carefully. His public acclaim seemed to heighten his loneliness. A wife would be someone to fly with—a friend, “a crew.”
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Every time he shook hands with a girl, the press promptly had him “engaged.” A movie company had offered him a flat million dollars for close-ups of his face during a marriage ceremony. Who the bride was didn’t matter.

This was his second record-breaking flight, and he felt confident. The flight to Mexico City was fifteen hundred miles shorter than the distance from New York to Paris. The engine would not be overloaded, and the strength of his wings would not be tested by the calm tropical weather, yet the flight proved to be more difficult than he had expected. Unlike the northeast route to Paris, he flew southwest into the night. Fog and rain-streaked darkness followed him through Houston, Texas, and for six hundred and fifty miles he flew blind, forced to gauge his route by instruments. When he reached Tampico, on the gulf coast of Mexico, he expected to fly straight to Mexico City, two hundred and fifty miles away, but, engulfed by fog and without a plotted course, he drifted three hundred miles west to the state of Guadalajara, deep into the mountains of the Sierra Madre. Twenty-five hours into the flight he was lost, meandering over nameless territory, unmarked by rivers, railroads, and towns.
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