The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (43 page)

She wore a white wedding dress with a lace cap and veil and carried a bouquet of spring flowers, larkspur and columbine, picked and arranged by her sister Elisabeth. The Reverend Dr. William Adams Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, conducted the ceremony.
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Their honeymoon immediately afterward resembled, as much as anything else, a prison break. It had been arranged that they would slip out the back of the house and spirit themselves to a yacht on Long Island Sound, in which they would leisurely cruise to the Morrows’ summer home in Maine. “We escaped in a borrowed car,” Anne wrote. “I seem to remember lying down in the bottom while passing the crowd of reporters at the gate.” They then swapped cars at a friend’s house, donned hats and dark glasses, and motored to the spot on the Sound where they found a dinghy tied to a tree and rowed it out to the thirty-eight-foot boat, named
Mouette
, a gift to the Lindberghs, which was moored right offshore.
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By the time news got out about their wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh were motoring far down the Sound, headed to Block Island under cover of darkest night. Meanwhile, when the press people learned they had been foiled, reporters hunted them down like animals.

When they made Block Island on the second day, even though they remained disguised, the Lindberghs were spotted and revealed. “One man in an open boat circled around us in harbor for seven straight hours, his wake rocking us constantly,” Anne said, “as he shouted demands that we come out on deck and pose for him … I felt like an escaped convict. This was not freedom.”

They pressed on toward Maine with full fuel and water tanks and an icebox loaded with block ice, dining on fancy canned foods such as pâté de foie gras, exotic fruits, and cases of ginger ale, and they were having the best of honeymooners’ time between the attacks of the reporters, which quickly caused them to flee a comfortable anchorage at the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, harbor and spend a storm-tossed night anchored on a fishing bank in the open ocean, “hearing the dishes crash at every big wave,” all to elude the pestilent press.
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At last they reached the coast of Maine, only to be assailed by “that terrifying drone of a plane hunting you, and boats,” Anne wrote to her mother, even as a press-hired seaplane hove into view. “I don’t feel angry about it anymore—it is inevitable. But it was a terrible shock to wake up from that blissfully quiet existence of being nobodies … without being followed, stared at, shouted at; to be waked by the harsh, smirking voice of a reporter outside our window one morning: ‘Is this Colonel Lindbergh’s boat?’ ”
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T
HE LIFE THAT THE
L
INDBERGHS LED
was every bit as hectic and exciting as Anne had imagined. Like Eddie Rickenbacker before him, Charles was now the world’s resident guru not only for aviation but seemingly for practically every other matter under the sun.

Anne was soon infected with Charles’s distaste for the press, all the more so after the running pursuit of their honeymoon cruise. “Never say anything you wouldn’t want shouted from the housetops,” Lindbergh had warned her, “and never write anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of a newspaper.” She had taken these admonishments to heart during their courtship, disguising her letters home and to friends on the suspicion that her mail was being opened, and using code words for Charles (he became Boyd) and for other important events and elements in her life.

Even though there was plenty of good reason for his antipathy Lindbergh fundamentally misunderstood the press. He believed that the less said the better, on the theory that the reporters would thus have fewer chances to misquote him or misinterpret him. The same went for photographers; both he and Anne began putting on disguises when going out in public to keep from being recognized, and they continued the practice for many years afterward.

Lindbergh failed to recognize that his very secrecy was what created so much of the unwanted attention by the newspapers. He might have taken a lesson from his contemporary the great Swedish actress Greta Garbo, whose aversion to the press and publicity produced a constant and outsized flurry of activity by the paparazzi of the day.

Instead, Lindbergh seems to have taken the officious, offensive, and boorish behavior of the newspapermen as a personal affront and any attempt to pry into his personal life as a deliberate insult. He did not seem to grasp that these people—reporters, photographers, editors, etc.—were for the most part merely trying to make a living from their bosses, who were in turn driven by orders from above to keep circulation moving. Eventually, his relations with newspapers degenerated to the extent that he became convinced that America’s founders had erred when they included “freedom of the press” in the First Amendment.

In any event, Lindbergh’s work with Transcontinental and Pan Am kept him almost perpetually on the go in between other adventures. Anne was no stay-at-home wife but went with him as a sort of assistant and, in time, a radio operator-telegrapher and navigator. Together they crisscrossed the country—San Francisco with the famed woman flier Amelia Earhart; Cleveland for the air show and races; Santa Fe; Detroit to see Evangeline; Los Angeles for dinner with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the two biggest movie stars of the day; Washington; Kansas City; New York; and the newly elected president of the United States Herbert Hoover’s fishing camp in the Shenandoah Valley. In fact, there was no Lindbergh home to return to. During all these months they lived in hotels or stayed with Charles’s many new friends, who tended to be men of “substance”—bankers, lawyers, airline or railroad owners—and, of course, at Harry and Caroline Guggenheim’s mansion Falaise. Eventually, Anne became an enthusiastic pilot herself, with the great Lindbergh himself as her instructor. As a perfectionist, he expected nothing less from his wife, and in time she became an excellent flier.

The couple complemented each other in a symbiotic way. She was educated in classics and fine arts, while his interest in literature ran to (and stopped in the neighborhood of) Robert Service. He knew nothing of music and had a tin ear, while Anne played the piano. She was a student of fine arts and sculpture and he appreciated pictures of things he could readily identify.

On the other hand, he had developed a scientific mind that grasped the positions of the stars in the heavens and the curvature of Earth; ultimately he delved deeply into history, ancient and modern, anthropology, politics, philosophy, economics, and animal husbandry, of which he was already something of an expert. Above all he was a man of science. Nevertheless, Anne came to know him as a person of great sensitivity, as she had suspected almost from the beginning, and someone she could talk with easily.

And while all of that and everything else was going on, by the last of 1929 she managed to get pregnant.

A
FTER A WHIRLWIND GOODWILL
and air-route survey tour of the Caribbean basin with Mr. and Mrs. Juan Trippe of Pan Am—during which Anne was frequently discomforted by morning sickness, which she mistook for airsickness until the doctor confirmed she was going to have a baby—Anne moved into her parents’ house for the duration of her pregnancy. The press began gearing up for the big event by hovering around the gates of Next Day Hill like a stupendous flock of geese, and hyping the story of the forthcoming Lindbergh nativity as if it involved a royal heir. It was reported that newspapers were offering substantial bribes to telegraphers and phone operators for information regarding the event. For their part, Charles and Anne decided against giving the press even the courtesy of
an announcement
of the birth and arranged to notify Evangeline in Detroit by coded wire.

On June 22, 1930, coincidentally Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III came into the world, but it would be two more weeks before the Lindberghs would reveal to the press even the name of the child. Nevertheless, the occasion set off a delirious new round of worldwide rejoicing as tens of thousands of telegrams, flowers, cards, letters, and baby gifts—many of them quite elegant—flooded into Next Day Hill. Desperate for news and photographs of the Lindbergh heir, some newspapers began floating disgusting rumors of a birth gone wrong, forcing Lindbergh at last to call a press conference and give details about the baby. For its own part, the press in general was beginning to sour on what many interpreted as the constant whiff of arrogance in the great transatlantic hero, and a sort of mini-backlash occurred, with columnists suggesting that Lindbergh was, in effect, biting the hand that fed him. All in all it was an unpleasant episode in the Lindberghs’ seemingly intractable “war with the press,” but afterward, like fighters who have beaten each other into exhaustion, a kind of uneasy truce was declared—if not by Anne and Charles, then by the press—until the next round could begin. Around the same time, the Lindberghs were suffered to endure a shocking incident of reckless and inhumane invasion of privacy when gawkers managed to drive through the gate at Next Day Hill and run over Anne and Constance’s childhood pet terrier, Daffin, mortally injuring but not immediately killing the dog, and not even stopping to try and help.
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I
T WAS DURING THIS SAME SUMMER OF 1930
that Lindbergh went to Cleveland for the air races and met for the first time the German flying ace Ernst Udet. They got along famously. While there, Lindbergh also ordered a new plane for himself and Anne, a low-wing, dual cockpit capable of flying long distances. It was modern in every aspect, from the latest navigation aids, a generator-based electrical system that could heat flying suits at high altitudes, and sliding plastic-style cockpit canopies of the type later used in World War II fighter planes.
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Lindbergh took delivery of the plane in Los Angeles and the two of them set out for New York, breaking the current speed record by three hours.

Now that a family had been started, Lindbergh at last turned to the task of making a home. Anne, who had hinted once that she would love to live in New England, knew that would never do because of its frequent fogs. Charles needed to be near but not
in
Manhattan, because of his association with Transcontinental and Pan Am and other business connections. They discussed Long Island because of its many flying fields, but Charles finally settled on an approximately five-hundred-acre tract of property not far from Princeton, New Jersey, where they could build a home that would at once give them privacy and access to airfields around the New York area and also remain close to Anne’s parents’ place at Englewood. It “had a brook, and fields and woodlands filled with beautiful oaks,” and as they began designing a house with the help of an architect, they meanwhile rented a quaint old farmhouse where Anne settled into motherhood.
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Charlie, as they called him, soon began to resemble his famous father, with the cleft chin, blue eyes, broad smile, and wavy shock of blond hair. Like many fathers, Lindbergh at first did not seem to know what to make of the baby, but as he grew into a toddler his father was soon “flying” him around the room above his head—“ceiling flying,” Lindbergh called it. There were two dogs in the family, a fierce Scottish terrier named Skean (Gaelic for “dagger”) and an equally intrepid fox terrier named Wagoosh (after Charles’s dog back in Little Falls). At that point the Lindberghs employed a maid, a cook, a butler, and soon hired a new baby nurse after the departure of their first one. She was twenty-four-year-old Betty Gow who had left her native Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of fourteen to earn her keep as a servant in America. Now she was about to figure in a horror that would soon darken the bright sun presently hovering over the Lindbergh household.

Charles had become increasingly restless during Anne’s pregnancy, which in its latter stages had more or less grounded him, except for a trying episode involving the investigation into the cause of the dreadful plane crash in Kansas that had killed Knute Rockne and seven others. This was the crash that had so concerned Eddie Rickenbacker, then general manager of TWA. As chairman of a federal aviation commission Lindbergh explained that the crash was due to a wing failure.

Now Lindbergh was proposing another “survey” flight such as the one recently undertaken through the Caribbean to sketch out new passenger air routes for Pan Am—only this time it would be a three-month grind reaching halfway around the earth from Washington to Alaska, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, with occasional stops along the way for food and fuel.

It is self-evident that any new mother who would consent to such a departure from her child must have uncommon devotion to her husband, and Anne filled this role to its uttermost degree. Charles had helped her become a pilot, as well as a radio-telegraph operator, and with dual controls in the Sirius she could spell him in periods of flying. It was this kind of partnership that he had envisioned when he proposed to her, though Anne had not understood it at the time.

Anne knew her life was now an adventure inextricably linked with her husband and, contrary to the opinions of some of her more recent biographers, didn’t seem uncomfortable with it.
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“I went on them proudly,” she wrote later, “taking my place as a crew member. The beauty and mystery of flying never palled, and I was deeply involved in my job of operating the radio.”
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L
IKE HIS TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH
, the path to the Orient that Lindbergh chose to take had never been flown before—a 7,100-mile great circle route that would have him flying over some of the most desolate, inhospitable, and uncharted territory on the planet. In preparation, he again measured every item to be taken in terms of its weight, including a six-pound shotgun and limited number of shells in case they were forced down and had to hunt for food. The big, sleek, black-painted Sirius had been converted to a seaplane with pontoons for wheels, and a more powerful 600-horsepower engine was installed.
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