Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (14 page)

Nonetheless, the
New York Times
pursued him. Interpreting Lindbergh’s desire for a “private” life as a wish to marry, the newspaper launched a drive to snag him a wife. Like a matchmaker, the newspaper reported him in “perfect health” (although a little thin for his six-feet-two-inches),
²³
and blessed with a small fortune (estimated between $400,000 and $1 million).
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If any woman was seen within Lindbergh’s proximity, he was, reportedly, “engaged.” And Lindbergh was constantly swarmed by suitors—from the daughters of wealthy businessmen
and high public officials to street walkers and starlets who demanded his attention. The protection of friends worked against him. Guarded in the grand salons and country estates of the rich and powerful, safe from the intrusive press, he had little time alone with women. Charles was now twenty-six years old, and he had never had a date.

Before the flight he wasn’t interested in girls; after the flight he was suspect and cold.
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A wunderkind in an adult society of aviators, statesmen, and politicians, Charles had a social life that was frozen in time. When he left his friends and his mother in Wisconsin five years earlier, he had left his boyhood behind. And all that he had ever known of intimacy was his father’s abandonment and his mother’s suffocation. Everything in between—easy conversation, dating, and sexuality—was nothing more than a pleasant abstraction.

Nonetheless, the rumors were right: Lindbergh was ready to take a wife. Embarking on a “girl-meeting project,” much as he charted a map for a flight, he reviewed in his mind the possibilities. Thoughts of Anne Morrow never surfaced. She had seemed so young, shy, and naïve, more like a schoolgirl than a prospective mate.
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Insulated at Smith from news of Lindbergh’s travels and the public debate, Anne wondered why he was so silent. Hadn’t he promised to teach her and Elisabeth to fly? Nearly three months without a call from him, and Anne was feeling rejected. It never crossed her mind that Lindbergh had met hundreds of young women and had invited many to fly in his plane; she chose to protect herself from disappointment. Extolling the virtues of Platonic love, she asked her diary whether it was possible to love someone “objectively”—to view Lindbergh as an “oracle” rather than as a “carnal” presence. It was the perfect solution. The “divinity” of the relationship would be preserved, as though the absence of one’s beloved was merely a “condensed presence.”
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But she considered her envy of Elisabeth’s happiness with Constance to be selfish and sinful. It would be better to find solace in nature, she concluded.
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Dwight Jr.’s illness brought the Morrow family together, but it sent a chill through their long-awaited Easter holiday. Elisabeth, at the request of her brother, accompanied him to Southern Pines, a rest home in
North Carolina, where they were met by their maternal grandmother, Annie Cutter. It seemed all too appropriate that Betty had called her mother for help. Betty saw her son as she had seen her father—a sensitive, high-strung “genius” unable to “cope” with the pressures of conventional masculine life. Although the medical jargon had changed in the thirty years since Betty’s father was labeled neurasthenic, Dwight Jr. was considered “of nervous temperament.” Who better than her mother, a nursemaid to her husband all his life, to help raise the spirits of a boy who felt inadequate to the demands of manhood?
²⁹

Strangely, Dwight Jr. drew strength from his madness. Perhaps for the first time, in the aftermath of his breakdown, he was aware that he was different from his father. While his father could easily harness his intellect, Dwight fractured in the process, succumbing to paroxysms of fear and self-doubt. Sheltered in the rest home, he sought to prove himself worthy to his family by challenging his father’s standards. The father was certain that ancient and European literature and history were the core of Western civilization; Dwight Jr. studied the “mysteries” of Native American culture. The father played a mediocre game of golf; the son sought mastery. On the golf course at Southern Pines, he practiced the game with a passion. When he finally hit a hole in one, he cabled his father: “
CURED
.”
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Dwight Jr.’s words shouted through the wires; finally he too was a winner.

Since Elisabeth was occupied with helping Dwight Jr., Anne went to Mexico on holiday alone. Certain that her stay would be cast in “shadows” without the “sunlight” of her sister’s presence,
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she nonetheless threw herself into the beauty of the Mexican landscape. Her diary assumed a new dimension, building on the multisensory style of her adolescent essays. She absorbed the line, color, and sound of the landscape—the montage of sun and shade, fire and ice—splashing it onto her pages as though she were composing an expressionist painting.
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To Anne’s surprise, she did not miss Elisabeth. She found the solitude both naughty and exhilarating. On Easter Sunday, April 8, two
days after Dwight’s cable to his father, Anne echoed her brother’s call for self-confirmation. She would no longer be weak and self-apologetic, pining away for recognition from Charles. “Colonel. L.” was not to be her standard; he would have to rise to her measure.
³³

Elisabeth, too, had found release. Alone in Englewood, out of sight of her mother, she reveled in her autonomy. Playing responsibility against desire, she used her devotion to Dwight Jr. to garner time alone with Connie. Connie’s presence was an anodyne; with Connie, Elisabeth didn’t feel sick. Plagued with poor health since a bout with pneumonia during her freshman year at Smith, Elisabeth was short of breath and easily fatigued. Her mother, perhaps thinking of the death of Mary, her twin, had spun webs of restrictions around Elisabeth until the daughter screamed in suffocation. But only Connie seemed to hear.

Elisabeth had met Constance in a philosophy class in 1924, during her junior year at Smith. There was an immediate bond between them, strengthened by their belief in God and prayer. Connie, the daughter of a wealthy leather merchant, was worldly, assertive, and practical, with searing blue eyes, curly blond hair, and a tall husky frame that radiated confidence. She alone seemed capable of piercing Elisabeth’s persona, exposing her fearful and fragile personality. With Connie, Elisabeth could talk about everything—personal relationships, literature, and philosophy. As Charles did to Anne, Connie appeared to Elisabeth as a member of superior breed, capable of raising her to a higher moral realm. Elisabeth made a pact with Connie not to love anyone else, least of all a man. They believed that sexuality tainted love, debasing and diminishing the spiritual bond. Whether Elisabeth was frightened of sexual intimacy, was in need of Connie’s maternal warmth, or was homosexual is not clear. Their love, rooted in Presbyterian piety and Victorian virtue, was strangely naïve. Frightened of their feelings for each other, they implored God to give them wisdom and guidance.
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To Dwight and Betty Morrow, the fundamentalist teachings of the Hebrew Bible condemned love between women as alien and abhorrent;
it was even more distressful to them because their family was in the public eye. It is difficult to separate their desire to protect Elisabeth’s health from their need to keep her apart from Connie, and it is difficult to discount the psychosomatic aspects of Elisabeth’s illness—the digestive problems, the nervousness, and the fatigue—from the guilt she may have felt in loving another woman.

Yet Betty had had “crushes” on women at Smith, and her own adjustment to heterosexuality had been both slow and difficult.
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Had mother and daughter shared these feelings, they might have alleviated the tension, but there is no evidence of such conversations. As it was, Elisabeth staged an underground war.

While Anne saw Elisabeth as gracefully confident, she was, in fact, nervous and sad. Anne sensed Elisabeth’s pulling away but could not understand the reason. Elisabeth’s preoccupation with Connie angered Anne. A friend of Connie’s later said, “Anne would always feel that it was Connie Chilton who stole her sister.”
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By necessity, Anne moved closer to her younger sister, Con. Just as ready to adore her as she had worshiped Elisabeth, Con was to Anne the ideal woman, a height to which she could only aspire. When Con joined her in Mexico, they had a “perfect” time. They shared the warmth and beauty of the landscape and established a rhythm and a reciprocity that would later serve as Anne’s paradigm for the perfect heterosexual relationship.
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It was like being in love, she wrote.
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Anne had found victory in her trip to Mexico. Feeling productive and back in control, she was eager to return to school. But no sooner had she boarded the train for Northampton than her obsession with Charles Lindbergh returned. This time, she rejoiced in his superiority. She knew she would never be a great aviator; she took solace in her admiration for him. After all, she wrote, if she were more like him, she would never have recognized his greatness.
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Back at Smith life resumed its nightmarish quality. Anne felt confused and irrational, as though her center would not hold.
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Determined to fly again, with or without Lindbergh, Anne hired an
instructor at an airfield near Northampton. Flying opened to her a “fifth dimension”—a state of higher consciousness—but she condemned her efforts as “trivial” and “hysterical.”
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She felt like a child back in the nursery, pretending to be grown-up in her mother’s clothes.

While Anne watched Charles Lindbergh, Lindbergh, no doubt, watched Dwight Morrow. In fact, most of America was watching. Morrow had attracted the support of a powerful journalist, Walter Lippmann, the editor of
World Magazine
. Because he had an audience of more than ten million Americans, he was courted and feared by officials and politicians. His soft line on Latin American debt and his noninterventionist stance were construed by his critics as Bolshevik and un-American. But, like Morrow, Lippmann saw himself as a philosopher and a historian, a would-be academic coerced into the political arena by the force of his moral conscience.

When the Mexican government threatened to nationalize the oil industry, Lippmann and Morrow worked to protect American property rights. They negotiated a deal with the Mexican government that granted ownership to American oil companies and also tightened the restrictions on salable land.
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Emboldened by their success, they sought to resolve the church-government controversy that had split the country into warring factions. Establishing the key issue as the registration of priests, Morrow and Lippmann struck a deal whereby the church could keep its land if it permitted the government to regulate the clergy. The agreement was sealed, and the churches reopened. The hallmark of the achievement, Morrow wrote to his son, was that neither side could claim a victory.
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While time would reveal that Morrow’s negotiations had achieved nothing of enduring consequence, his diplomatic style gave the illusion that United States–Mexican rapprochement was possible. He was hailed as victorious on both sides of the table.
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By the end of March 1928, five months into Morrow’s service, his name was mentioned in Washington as the next Republican candidate for president. Will Rogers wrote:

Insulated from politics and unaware of her brother’s and sister’s rebellions, Anne began to enjoy her freedom. By May 1928, on her graduation from Smith, Anne felt more creative and more in tune with her body than ever before. She began to see herself apart from her mother and her sisters and beyond the “towering shadow” of Lindbergh.
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A career in writing seemed a possibility. That spring, she had won two prestigious academic prizes: the Elizabeth Montagu Prize for her essay on women of the eighteenth century and Madame d’Houdetot, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Literary Prize for her work of fiction called “Lida Was Beautiful.” The Comtesse d’Houdetot was a French aristocrat who defied her parents and the conventions of marriage by keeping a lover who held a key to her private garden. Intent on deceiving no one, she chose to live authentically, viewing life as would an innocent child.
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Implicit was Anne’s wish to judge life according to her own standards.

“Lida Was Beautiful” is a wicked little piece about a young woman’s misfortune of having a beautiful cousin. Poetic and carefully executed, it was a thinly veiled account of Anne’s envy of Elisabeth. But it ends on a note of self-appreciation. Like Anne, the protagonist, a plain Jane, was young, slim, and worthy of admiration.
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Anne was proud of her prizes and enjoyed the attention they elicited from her family. Still, the notion of her “smallness”—her insignificance—whispered through the bravada.
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Anne returned home in the summer of 1928, as her mother had done thirty-two years earlier. Even though she did not carry her mother’s economic and family burdens, she felt stripped of purpose. With only the hope of a literary career and vague notions of teaching and marriage, Anne had nothing to do and no plans for the future. Alone in Englewood, thousands of miles away from her parents, Anne wrote incessantly in her diary, pushing her observations toward form and cohesion.
The diary became a laboratory in which to examine art and love. They were, she wrote, rooted in the same source—the need to infuse ordinary life with the unifying “magic” of perfection. But metaphysics often gave way to fantasy. Anne created a pantheistic world moved by mysteries she could not explain. Thrilled yet frightened by the power of her vision, sensing that she was on the verge of self-discovery, she longed for “fusion” with someone or something larger than herself.