America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (25 page)

This was not the first time that a Lindbergh’s political career ended in despair. C. A. Lindbergh’s father, Ola Mansson, born in 1808 in Skåne, a province in southern Sweden, had served a dozen years in the Swedish Parliament before being caught embezzling money from the Bank of Sweden. Just as Mansson lost his seat in Parliament, his wife—and the mother of his eight children—discovered that he had taken up with a mistress nearly thirty years his junior. The product of this illicit liaison, C.A. was born in Stockholm in 1858. The following year, abandoning his Swedish family, Mansson immigrated with his lover and infant son to America. After settling on a Minnesota farm and renaming himself August Lindbergh (an amalgam of the Swedish words for “linden tree” and “mountain”), he would father five more children with his common-law wife. Though Charles Lindbergh, like his father, would never learn all the details about August Lindbergh’s checkered history, he would follow in his footsteps. He, too, would establish families on both sides of the Atlantic (though the aviator would start by siring children in America rather than in Europe). And in 1958, exactly a century after the birth of C.A., a German woman slightly more than half Charles Lindbergh’s age would bring into the world the first of his seven illegitimate European children.

After finishing law school at the University of Michigan in 1883, C. A. Lindbergh settled in Little Falls, Minnesota, a small town on the Mississippi River located in the middle of the state. The six-footer with the dimpled chin—a feature shared by his son—was considered by many to be “the handsomest man in Little Falls.” In 1887, C.A., who had built a thriving law practice as well as an extensive real estate business, married Mary LaFond, an attractive young woman born on the Minnesota frontier who was the daughter of his landlord. She died a decade later, leaving him with two daughters, Lillian and Eva. In 1900, the forty-two-year-old widower began wooing Evangeline Lodge Land, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan. The daughter of Charles Land, a Detroit dentist and inventor, and Evangeline Lodge, this chemistry major, once known as “the most beautiful girl at Ann Arbor,” had just arrived in Little Falls to take up a position as a schoolteacher. While Evangeline Land was bright, she was subject to violent mood swings. Rage attacks would alternate with periods of extreme detachment, for which she would later earn the nickname “Stone Face.” Of her erratic behavior, her stepdaughter Eva would once muse, “Only insanity explains it.” As Charles later put it, his mother had a “flashy
Irish
temper” and was “often unpredictable.” A case in point: in December 1900, Evangeline refused to teach in her drafty fifth-floor classroom and moved some laboratory equipment downstairs. When the superintendent told her that to do so was to violate school regulations, she walked out on the spot, never to return. Not long after tying the knot in March 1901, C.A. and Evangeline, along with the two daughters from his first marriage, moved into a new three-story, thirteen-room house on a 120-acre estate in Little Falls. Charles, the couple’s only child, was born in February 1902.

Charles Lindbergh’s earliest memory was of a devastating trauma. On the morning of August 6, 1905, Lindholm Manor, as Evangeline dubbed the “dream house” that C.A. had built for her, suddenly caught fire. After being rushed down the steps, Charles saw a huge cloud of smoke; his nurse told him not to look back. “Where is my father—my mother?” the terrified three-year-old then yelled to her. “What will happen to my toys?” While no one perished, his family was never the same. C.A. built a new house upon the same foundation, but the next iteration was just one and a half stories. Gone were the cook, maid, and nurse who had slept in the servants’ quarters on the third floor of the old house. Having recently moved out of the master bedroom, C.A. was no longer willing to invest much in the marriage.

While Lindbergh’s father was more stable than his mother, his old man was also no joy to be around. Before her wedding, Evangeline had wondered if C.A. might be “a bit too sharp-witted,” and these concerns turned out to be well grounded. Described by contemporaries as “austere,” “severe,” and “eccentric,” and by one biographer as “sadistic,” C.A. could not stop denigrating his nearest and dearest. “I do not tell people when I am pleased,” he once wrote to his daughter Eva. “I tell them when I am not pleased.” Not averse to slapping his wife, C.A. once slimed her as “a bloodsucker” within earshot of the boy, whom he would repeatedly berate with epithets such as “fool.” And like his father (and his son), C.A. was a womanizer. At times, Evangeline’s fury nearly devolved into violence. She once grabbed a gun and held it to her husband’s head, threatening to shoot. After C.A. was elected to Congress in 1906, the couple worked out their informal separation agreement. “I would rather be dead a hundred times [than live with her],” C.A. once wrote to his daughter Eva. In order for Charles to maintain some kind of relationship with his father, he would attend school in Washington and go back to the Minnesota farm only in the summer.

While Charles would later insist that he had enjoyed an idyllic Tom Sawyer–like childhood, his early behavior suggests the presence of deep emotional wounds. With his two high-maintenance parents engaged in a perpetual cold war, the boy kept looking for order and comfort wherever he could find it. For emotional sustenance, he turned to nature. In the rebuilt Minnesota house, Charles developed a fondness for the screened-in sleeping porch in the back that overlooked the roaring Mississippi River. A decade and a half before hopping into his first plane, he had already found a home in the sky. He often slept on a cot in this “bedroom,” even in the Minnesota winter. “I was,” noted the aviator years later, “in close contact with sun, wind, rain, and stars.” Like other hard-core collectors such as Kinsey, he also learned to bond with things rather than people. “As a boy,” he later wrote, “I had collected about everything—stones, butterflies, coins, turtles, cigarette cards, cigar bands, stamps, tin cans, lead pipe, and burned-out electric-light bulbs, among other items.” During his first two decades, Lindbergh’s favorite flesh-and-blood companions were the family’s farm dogs—such as Tody, a dachshund-stretch mongrel, and Spot, a brown-and-white hunting dog—who doubled as his bedmates. He formed few friendships with peers; his mother would have to pay neighborhood boys to play with him. In Washington, his classmates nicknamed the socially obtuse loner “Cheese” (his name sounded like the particularly smelly Dutch Limburger). Obsessed with self-reliance, C.A. tried to convince Charles that he was not missing much. “I have one thing that I take pride in above all others,” C.A. would write to his teenage son, “and that is that you are able to buck the world alone and independent if it was necessary. I love that quality in a person, and especially in you, because it was hardly forced upon you.” But little did the self-absorbed C.A. realize that Charles could not have done otherwise. Adhering to this paternal injunction, Charles Lindbergh would forever view his lack of connection with fellow human beings as an asset to celebrate rather than a source of anguish to mourn. And in solitude, he would always exult.

With his father out of Congress, in the fall of 1917 Charles began his senior year of high school in Little Falls. His father also returned to Minnesota, but he continued to live under a separate roof. The emotionally needy Evangeline now treated Charles as if he were her husband and confidant rather than her son. At fifteen, he ran the household. The precocious Mr. Fix-It threw himself into both winterizing and mechanizing the farm. He built a well in the basement for which he did all the plumbing himself. He also constructed a concrete duck pond, which he named “Moo Pond” after the Ojibway term for “dirt”—the neatnik was keenly aware that “a duck pond would almost always be dirty”—as well as a suspension bridge out of barbed wire. He began breeding a variety of animals including Guernsey cattle, Shropshire sheep, and Toulouse geese, which he sold in Minneapolis. The small farm became one of the most high-tech affairs in the area. Charles ordered a three-wheeled tractor from LaCrosse, which he assembled himself, and installed a souped-up Empire Milking Machine, which he also marketed to other farmers. Charles preferred managing the farm to attending his classes; only physics and mechanical drawing were of any interest. Unwilling to do any homework, he nearly flunked out. “I was,” he later recalled, “rescued by World War I.” In early 1918, with food in short supply, the principal announced that students could get academic credit for farmwork. That final semester, Charles made only one more trip to school—to pick up his diploma on June 5. After the armistice was signed in November 1918, he gradually turned the farm back over to tenants and started thinking about college. “It was a difficult and rather heartbreaking procedure giving up the stock and machinery,” he later wrote. Like Kinsey, as an adolescent Lindbergh had developed close ties to his farm’s animals and gadgets, but not to his parents or to any other human beings.

In the fall of 1920, Lindbergh jumped on his motorcycle—a twin-cylinder Excelsior—and drove the 350 miles to Madison, Wisconsin. He selected the University of Wisconsin less for its impressive engineering school than for the lakes near campus. As he later explained, “I could not be happy living long away from water.” Psychologically fused with her son, Evangeline could not abide the thought of losing her longtime roommate; she had already taken the train to Madison to find them an apartment. This unusual living arrangement had the neighbors whispering about what had brought the apparently unmarried middle-aged woman and the dashing college student together. Once again, Lindbergh refused to do even the minimum to stay afloat academically. He barely passed most classes, and he failed English. On a freshman essay, “An Ideal Student,” in which he preached the “fundamentals of hygiene,” his instructor gave him an F, commenting, “Again, some excellent touches, but marred by an irritating profusion of mechanical errors. Please arrange for a conference at once.” (He ignored the request.) Extracurricular activities—the ROTC program and the rifle and pistol teams—were all that he cared about. “I was on academic probation when I entered my sophomore year,” he later wrote. “So I decided to leave the university before I received official notification to do so.”

In March 1922, he fled to Lincoln, Nebraska, to begin flying school. Reacting like a jilted lover, his mother was nearly speechless. “
Il est très difficile
,” she wrote to him in her broken French—though college-educated, she was no foreign language whiz—right after his departure, “
de viver
[
sic
] [live]
dans cet
‘flat’
mais très necessaire. Il est aussi très difficile d’exprimer mes sentiments
so I’ll not try to.” Evangeline, who began inundating (and embarrassing) her son with daily letters, would not let go easily. “There has been no word from you for 2 weeks and 2 days,” she stated a few years later in a missive, in which she threatened a visit unless he wrote back right away, “and you have not written me for 2 weeks and 5 days—exact reckoning.” Only by taking to the air would Lindbergh manage to gain his freedom from his overbearing mother.

For the next couple of years, he eked out a living as a stunt pilot, entertaining the public in more than seven hundred barnstorming flights. In March 1924, to get his hands on higher-performing planes, the technophile enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the flight training program in San Antonio, Texas, Lindbergh was in his element. “Military training,” he later recalled, “taught me precision and the perfection of flying techniques.” Relishing his courses in aerodynamics, meteorology, and bombing methods, the college dropout metamorphosed into a stellar student. “For the first time in my experience,” he later wrote, “school and life became both rationally and emotionally connected.” The following March, Lindbergh graduated first in his class—he had been one of 104 entering students—and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.

But in the Army, “Slim,” as the 145-pound cadet was called, still could not make a friend. His main way to connect with others was to choreograph practical jokes, and he specialized not in the harmless—say, dropping toothpaste into a snoring mouth—but in the sadistic. To unnerve a soldier sleeping in the buff, who boasted about nights with prostitutes in San Antonio’s “Spick Town”—such racist vernacular was common in the 1920s—Lindbergh devised a startling contrapasso. “I suggested,” he noted proudly more than forty years after the fact, “that we paint the penis green.” And he did not stop there. To ensure a rude awakening, Lindbergh also had the erect member lassoed with some string, which he then hooked up to the ceiling while another soldier tugged on it from outside the barracks.

After moving to St. Louis in the fall of 1925 to run airmail routes for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, this envious virgin, too shy to get anywhere near a nubile woman, was still taunting fellow pilots who pursued sexual adventures. Lindbergh would not allow a roommate, Phil Love, to talk on the phone to his girlfriend—he would make a racket by crashing pots and pans—and every time Love went out on a date, Lindbergh would stick frogs or lizards in his bed. And he almost killed another roommate, Bud Gurney, who, after a night on the town, took a couple of gulps from a water jug into which Lindbergh had poured kerosene. In his last few months in St. Louis, “Slim” lived alone, as no one would dare room with him anymore.

“I’ll organize a flight to Paris!”

Lindbergh later recalled in his memoir that the idea first came to him in September 1926, as he was high up in the moonlit sky, en route from Peoria to Chicago.

Five months earlier, Robertson’s chief pilot had inaugurated its airmail route—the second in the nation—which went from St. Louis to Chicago via Springfield and Peoria. On the afternoon of April 15, 1926, a crowd of a couple hundred had given Lindbergh (along with the two pilots whom he had hired to work under him) a grand send-off, which was widely covered by the press. “We pilots…all felt,” he later wrote, “that we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era.” But within a few months, the monotony of the task—the contract called for five round-trips a week between St. Louis and Chicago—was leaving him feeling apathetic and restless. He and his team had mastered the challenge of boring through the night sky, completing more than 99 percent of their scheduled flights.