America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (29 page)

Lindbergh’s concern about the lack of accuracy in reporters’ accounts of his past is almost comic, given that his post–World War II private life was nothing but a string of secrets that he feared might leak out at any moment. Small wonder, then, that he disdained biographers. While he tried to pass himself off as an easygoing suburban family man, he was actually a high-strung sex addict who was spending a huge chunk of his time planning and engaging in his trysts. As with Kinsey, the family homestead—a four-acre plot of land in Darien, Connecticut, that he purchased in 1946—gave some clues to his little-known flip side. The stucco house was surrounded by disorder, except for “pockets of horticultural order here and there,” Reeve Lindbergh has written. Right outside the door stood a young maple tree on the service line of an old tennis court. A wide variety of animals—deer, geese, snakes, and turtles—roamed the “unkempt wildness” of the land. And like Kinsey, Lindbergh also liked to shed garments in his backyard; he would skinny-dip in the nearby Long Island Sound and then lie naked on the beach.

When he was not tending to some project outdoors, Lindbergh squirreled himself away in his office, where he often went into a list-making frenzy. He began compiling lists of nearly everything, including events in his past such as all the planes he had ever flown and all the books he had ever read. And he was constantly updating his own to-do lists, which he divided into three categories, “Current,” “Immediate,” and “Near Future.” In 1963, he downsized his Darien digs, moving from the cavernous Tudor house to a new spartan dwelling, which had no dining room. “As if we were on an airplane, we ate on trays by the fire,” recalled his granddaughter Kristina, who often visited on school vacations.

He stayed with Anne and the children in Darien only a couple of months a year. And whenever he did return home, Lindbergh would invariably terrify them all. “This is a nonbenevolent dictatorship,” he would repeatedly bark out. “He laughed after he said it, but I didn’t,” Reeve has written. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

Lindbergh ruled over his subjects not with an iron fist but with ironclad lists. He demanded that Anne compile and continually update a complex series of household inventories, which documented every article of clothing, book, and kitchen item owned by the family. As per his directive, she also kept track of all her household expenditures, including every fifteen cents she doled out for rubber bands. When Anne did not comply, he got testy. An exasperated Anne was just as likely to find herself retreating to her room to cry when her husband was home as when he was away. And the paterfamilias who insisted on “Father”—“Dad” was verboten—would keep extensive checklists on his children. On a megachart, which had a column devoted to each of the five American Lindberghs, he would jot down—with his trusty Number 2 pencil—all their infractions such as “chewing gum,” “reading comics,” or “leaving shoes out in the rain.” As the no-nos added up, he would summon each child into his office for some discussion and/or a couple of half-hour lectures on, say, “Freedom and Responsibility” or “Downfall of Civilization.” And after the tête-à-tête, he would place the appropriate check marks on his chart, indicating that domestic order had been restored. The children felt otherwise. “I thought,” Reeve has recalled, “my father was, too often, both unfair and absurd.”

By the late 1940s, Anne realized that her husband was incapable of maintaining anything resembling a conventional marriage, but she couldn’t figure out why. As Reeve Lindbergh told me, after his death her mother confessed that she was constantly mulling over divorce in the decade between 1945 and 1955. But this easygoing and thoughtful problem solver eventually decided to accept Lindbergh for what he was. She made the most of her years of psychotherapy with the controversial psychiatrist Dr. John N. Rosen. While this shrink could be even more volatile than her husband—in 1983, Rosen would surrender his medical license when charged with dozens of ethical violations by a Pennsylvania medical board, including, most notably, the verbal, physical, and sexual abuse of hospitalized schizophrenic patients—he proved remarkably helpful with this high-functioning and verbally gifted ambulatory neurotic. Rosen put his finger on exactly what she was up against, explaining that her husband’s “compulsive
outward
orderliness” was compensating for his “
inward
disorderliness.” And to solve the existential problem that Lindbergh’s bewildering behavior posed, this introspective writer also turned to words. “My mother wrote her way back into the marriage,” Reeve stated.

Anne’s writing for public consumption evolved into the protofeminist classic
Gift from the Sea
. Begun in 1950 and released in 1955, this 127-page book of philosophical reflections went on to sell nearly three million copies. “I began these pages for myself,” Anne wrote, “in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.” While her husband’s eccentricity was extreme, the issues that Anne addressed were universal; she explored, for example, how couples inevitably grow apart after the “perfect unity” in the early years of marriage. To cope with such difficult periods in life and love, she advocated simple virtues such as patience and openness; she also stressed the joys to be found in solitude. In private, however, as revealed in
Against Wind and Tide
(2012), a collection of her letters and diaries from this period, Anne also decided to fight back. “As I read into the 1950s and 1960s and beyond,” noted Reeve, the volume’s editor, in the Introduction, “I recognized the person who had learned to stand up to a man whose good opinion she had once craved above all else.” Avoiding direct confrontation with her husband, “she began to embrace his absences,” Reeve told me. Relishing the chance to carve out her own life, Anne turned to other men to meet her needs for intimacy. Her lovers included Dana Atchley, the family doctor, and Alan Valentine, a prominent academic historian who served for fifteen years as the president of the University of Rochester. Anne stopped straying by the late 1950s, and Lindbergh never learned about these relationships. Though her husband was the sex addict, Anne was the partner who was saddled with the guilt. During her husband’s lifetime, as she later told biographer Scott Berg, Anne suspected that he had been unfaithful, but only once, with a beautiful young Filipina, whose picture he had brought back from one of his trips to Manila in the 1960s. And a few years after his death, as Susan Hertog reported in
Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life
(1999), Anne found love letters from Adrienne Arnett, the stewardess, with whom he carried on an affair between 1966 and 1972; however, she did not stumble upon any other evidence of his extracurricular activities.

It’s not clear exactly when Lindbergh first became a serial adulterer. Hard evidence for any affairs before the mid-1950s is missing. But given his remarkable ability to control other people—with each German mistress, he insisted on a vow of “secrecy,” threatening not to return if it was ever violated—this gap in the historical record doesn’t necessarily mean that his hyperactive sexual self remained dormant until then. We know about his German escapades only because after the death in 2001 of Brigitte Hesshaimer, one of his three German “wives,” her three children, who had discovered about 160 love letters on blue airmail paper sent to their mother by “C.”—the same sign-off that the aviator tended to use in his letters to Anne, who also died in 2001—felt free to reveal the truth. In the summer of 2003, Dyrk Hesshaimer, born in 1958; Astrid Hesshaimer, born in 1960; and David Hesshaimer, born in 1967, announced at an international press conference held in Munich’s Rathaus (town hall) that the famous aviator was their father. A DNA test conducted later that year confirmed their assertion. “At first, I was shocked,” stated Reeve, who has since met and become friendly with all seven European half siblings and their families. “But after a while,” she added, “I felt as if this news explained a great deal. Now I know why he was gone so much. I also understand why he was delighted when I was learning German and why he repeatedly advised me not to sleep with anyone you don’t want to have a child with.”

Lindbergh’s three children with the dark-haired Brigitte Hesshaimer also spoke at length about their famous father to a German journalist, Rudolf Schroeck, with whom they shared the letters. Schroeck’s ensuing book,
Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh
(
The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh
), appeared in 2005 (it has yet to be translated into English). His four other European children have never spoken publicly. Since the release of this insightful biography, which was widely and positively reviewed in Germany, both Astrid and David Hesshaimer have shunned the media. “All you need to know [about my father’s German families],” David wrote to me in a 2011 e-mail, “is already written in Rudolf Schroeck’s book.” In contrast, their elder brother, Dyrk, who appeared on European TV to promote the book, has occasionally fielded questions from reporters. In the fall of 2012, I became the first American writer to interview any of Lindbergh’s seven German children when I met with Dyrk for four hours in a Munich hotel. He is tall and lanky, speaks fluent English, and has long worked as a software programmer in his native Germany. “Of course, the word
double life
in the title of the biography,” he told me with a smile, “isn’t quite accurate.”

Schroeck’s book also contains some basic information about Lindbergh’s two other German families. With Marietta Hesshaimer, Brigitte’s sister, who was also dark-haired, he would have two children, Vago, born in 1962, and Christoph, born in 1966. And with a Prussian blonde, whom Schroeck referred to as “Valeska,” he would have two more children—a son born in 1959 and a daughter born in 1961. Seeking privacy, this mistress, who today resides in Baden-Baden, has not revealed her real name nor the first names of her two children. As children, Dyrk, Astrid, and David would often spend summer vacations with their aunt’s two children, but they had no idea that they were actually half siblings rather than cousins.

Lots of people seek out lots of sex, but only a select few start four families, three of which are “secret”; and it is this aspect of Lindbergh’s erotic life that is the most puzzling and puts him in a league of his own. His contemporary Louis Kahn—the influential architect was born a year before Lindbergh and also died in 1974—came close, but he stopped at one wife, two mistresses, and three children—one with each partner. What Kahn, whose story was told in the 2003 documentary,
My Architect: A Son’s Journey
, and Lindbergh shared was a preference for a nomadic existence, which may have had roots in their chaotic early lives. At three, Kahn also was victimized by a fire—it left permanent scars on his face—and emigrated with his impoverished parents from the Estonian island of Sarema to the United States.

Lindbergh, who had hardly felt connected to his family of origin, may have harbored a deep need for belonging that he did not know how to pursue in any other way. Fathering the children with his German mistresses may also have helped reduce his fears of abandonment by increasing their dependence on him. In contrast to his German lovers (particularly the Hesshaimer sisters, who rarely pushed back against his exacting demands), the American Adrienne Arnett, with whom he did not father a child, repeatedly threatened to throw him out whenever his teasing got out of hand, and she would not let him back into her life until he apologized.

While Valeska was the second of Lindbergh’s German mistresses to bear him a child, he was already intimate with her before he met either of the Hesshaimer sisters. In the mid-1950s, he hired the attractive blonde, twenty-two years his junior, as his translator—he had found her by placing an ad in the
Süddeustche Zeitung
, Munich’s leading newspaper. Blessed with a perfect command of English, Valeska had been working as a private secretary for Philip Rosenthal Jr., the flamboyant owner of a porcelain manufacturing business in Bavaria, with whom she had also been carrying on an affair. Lindbergh soon began sleeping with her both in Munich and in Rome, where he kept an apartment.

The tragicomic romantic complications, which would eventually require all of his obsessive skills to handle, didn’t ensue until March 1957. That’s when Lindbergh, accompanied by Valeska, paid a visit to a three-room, fifth-floor walk-up at 44 Agnesstrasse in Munich’s Schwabing district, where he was introduced to both Brigitte and Marietta for the first time. The two sisters had been living together there since 1955 (though Marietta was soon to move out). This modest apartment, which its current tenants showed me in the fall of 2012, was where Dyrk was conceived toward the end of 1957 and where he lived until he was six. “My sister Astrid and I used to sleep with my mother in the bedroom,” he stated, “except when my father came to visit; then we were exiled to the living room.” Dyrk also told me of his fond memories of the pancakes that his father used to make in the small kitchen. “He was a good pancake flipper,” Dyrk recalled. Lindbergh used to enjoy eating breakfast with Brigitte and the children on the small porch that jutted out from the living room and overlooked the building’s interior courtyard.

At the time of Lindbergh’s first visit to Agnesstrasse in March 1957, Brigitte—nicknamed “Bitusch”—was a thirty-one-year-old hatmaker and Marietta a thirty-three-year-old painter. Like Lindbergh, Valeska didn’t know the Hesshaimer sisters; she had only recently heard of them through a mutual German friend, Elisabeth, who escorted the former aviator and his secretary to their Schwabing apartment that day. While Brigitte and Marietta were aware that Lindbergh was a married man and already had a mistress—Valeska—they were both instantly taken by the fifty-five-year-old celebrity, who looked much younger than his years. Their attraction to Lindbergh also had roots peculiar to their era. “For my mother’s generation,” Dyrk remarked, “there was a shortage of eligible men, and foreigners who had a second family in Germany were not all that unusual. After all, many German men died in World War II, and those who returned were often tormented.”