America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  Home was then a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse where he shared a bedroom with his mother, Evangeline; his father maintained a separate residence. Though his parents could not stand each other, they could not divorce on account of the congressman’s political career. The young Charles was constantly shuttling from one temporary way station to the next; over the next few years, he would attend four other high schools. From his birth until the fall of 1920, when he started college, he would live at nearly two dozen different addresses.

  At nine thirty, the Native American, a man named Mr. Lyons, appeared, and off the trio went to the White House.

  A half hour later, looking over at Congressman Lindbergh, President Wilson stated, “The gifts are beautiful. I am delighted to receive them. Mrs. Wilson will also be pleased.”

  At that moment, C. A. Lindbergh introduced his son.

  “How are you?” asked the president, as he shook the adolescent’s hand.

  “Very well, thank you,” responded Charles.

  And that was it. President Wilson got back to thinking about the nation’s affairs; that evening, he would confer with three top congressional leaders on how to handle the “Lusitania Crisis,” the foreign policy mess that had resulted from the sinking of a British ship by a German submarine a year earlier and was about to lead to U.S. involvement in the Great War.

  After Charles returned to the boardinghouse, his mother peppered him with questions about the events of the day. When asked how he felt about meeting the president, the normally reticent boy blurted out, “It didn’t faze me any because the president is just a man, even if he is president.”

  Being just a man would not satisfy Charles Augustus Lindbergh; from boyhood on, he wanted to be a superman. For this fiercely ambitious loner, who, as his father once put it, never had much interest in “things on earth,” the presidency would not be a lofty enough goal. To chase his dreams, he would head for the heavens. “The very fact of flying,” he once wrote, “denied old concepts of impossibility.” For his extraordinary derring-do, he succeeded in becoming the most famous person on the planet in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

  As a pilot flying during an age when there was no air traffic to control, Lindbergh would enjoy hovering alone over the world like God himself. “I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics on the ground,” he once observed. “In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing.” A fawning press corps would agree that the svelte, six-foot, three-inch, blond and blue-eyed aviator possessed divine powers. “Lindbergh is no ordinary man,” observed the Sunday Express after his historic achievement. “He is the stuff heroes are made of. He defied death and…dazzles the world.”

  Lindbergh would never stop attempting larger-than-life deeds. Soon after returning from Paris, he became determined to conquer time itself. “If a man could learn to fly,” he wondered, “why could he not learn to live forever?” Throughout the 1930s, Lindbergh worked closely with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a physician who had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, on various scientific experiments in the hope of making his dream of eternal life a reality.

  And in the 1950s, he began engaging in sexual exploits that few mere mortals could even contemplate. To follow his outsized libido, this father of six children with Anne Morrow—the couple’s first, Charles Augustus Jr., murdered at the age of twenty months in the “crime of the century” in 1932, was followed by Jon, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve—would disappear from his family for months at a time. Taking on a Superman-like alias, Careu Kent, he started three new European families. Unbeknownst to his wife (and to A. Scott Berg, who penned the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1998 biography authorized by her), for the last two decades of his life, Lindbergh would regularly visit his three German mistresses, with whom he would sire a total of seven more children, on “love trips” to Europe. “Only an obsessive-compulsive person like my father could have managed to keep these three families secret,” his youngest child, the writer Reeve Lindbergh, told me. And he of the preternatural sexual appetite also squeezed in his fun. In the 1960s, Lindbergh also arranged trysts all over the world with his steady American girlfriend, a blonde and blue-eyed Pan Am stewardess forty years his junior. Moreover, during his trips to Africa and Asia on behalf of environmental nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund, the sexagenarian had numerous flings with young locals. “When I was a teenager, my grandfather used to tell us [the family] that he would sleep with the oldest woman in the tribe whenever he went to Kenya,” Kristina Lindbergh, his eldest grandchild, said to me in a recent interview. “We didn’t think much of it at the time. Given what we know now, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some more relatives.”

  Like Kinsey, Lindbergh viewed sex in purely mechanistic terms. For this high-flier, women were machines whose services he could use every now and then, rather than fellow human beings with whom he could build intimate relationships. This pattern had roots in his boyhood, when, to escape loneliness, he gravitated not toward bugs, as did Kinsey, but toward the inanimate. At ten, he became infatuated with the “new member of the family,” the Model T that his mother christened “Maria” (pronounced “Mariah”). A year later, though his feet could still barely reach the gas pedal, the boy was already a more able driver than either parent. “Maria,” he later mused, “brought modern science to our home, and nothing else attracted me as much.” In 1914, he used it to chauffeur C.A. during his congressional campaign. “While I wanted very much to have my father win,” Lindbergh later recalled, “my primary interest [was]…to be with him and drive Maria.” Charles and “Maria” were inseparable; he often sat beside her, making notes in a logbook he kept about her performance. In his senior year of high school in his native Minnesota, he ogled not girls but the latest gadgets in the local hardware store window. At the University of Wisconsin, the painfully shy engineering student “preferred to ride my motorcycle…[than to take on] the additional problem of women.” And in We, the bestselling quickie book completed after his return from Paris, he told the love story between him and his plane. “The Spirit of St. Louis,” he wrote, “is…like a living creature, gliding along smoothly, happily.…We shared our experiences together, each feeling beauty, life, and death as keenly, each dependent on the other’s loyalty. We have made this flight across the ocean, not I or it.”

  After the socially awkward aviator became a celebrity, he finally turned his attention to what he called “my girl-meeting project.” For the world’s most eligible bachelor, looking for the perfect wife resembled designing an exquisite new machine. “The physical characteristics I wanted in a woman,” he later wrote, “were not difficult to describe—good health, good form, good sight and hearing. Such qualities could be outlined like the specifications for an airplane. I wanted to marry a girl who liked flying.”

  In October 1928, at the age of twenty-six, he went out on his first date, which naturally took place in the air. A year earlier, President Calvin Coolidge had introduced him to the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Now Lindbergh took his daughter Anne for a spin around Long Island in a small, open-cockpit biplane. Anne passed the test with flying colors; she had no trouble steering and gave every indication that she would evolve into an exceptional copilot (which she, in fact, did). A few days later, Lindbergh invited her on a less consequential “ground date.” While driving her home, he proposed. Stunned, Anne initially demurred, responding, “You must be kidding! You don’t know me.”

  “Oh, I do know you,” the smitten aviator protested. (In the decades to come, his motor would continue to rev up quickly.) Then, without further ado, came the requisite flying lessons; the wedding took place in May 1929. “At first, my mother believed his awkwardness was rooted in his Midwestern simplicity,” Reeve Lindbergh explained to me.

  In the early years of the marriage, Anne’s rivals were of the mechanized variety. In March 1933, on the first anniversary of the kidnapping of Charles Jr. and right after the birth of Jon, with Anne at his side, Lindbergh too
k off on a nine-month trip around the world. Repeatedly ignoring and humiliating his wife—in front of a friend who was putting them up for the night, he once dragged her to bed by the ear—he was more interested in spending quality time with his specially designed Lockheed Sirius, Tingmissartoq (Eskimo for “he who flies like a big bird”), than with her. For the engineering geek, one of the highlights of this expedition was the night in Scotland that he spent fixing the plane’s broken cable during a cold rainstorm.

  Lindbergh and his wife would live in houses in beautiful settings all over the world—in suburban New Jersey and Connecticut, England, France, Switzerland, and Hawaii—but he rarely stayed home. After the birth of each of their children, he took to the air, leaving his family for a long trip. In fact, Lindbergh spent more hours in some of the Jennys—the World War I–era planes that he flew in the early 1920s—than in some of those homes. “Charles,” a family friend has stated, “was only interested in houses so that he’d have a place to ‘park’ Anne and the children.” By the 1950s, when his piloting days were over, he took to flying around the globe in “tourist class”—he received a nominal consulting fee from Pan Am for conducting inspections—to escape from his various human entanglements. As if he were still flying on a monoplane like The Spirit of St. Louis, he liked to travel light. Refusing to check any baggage, he would carry a trench coat draped around his briefcase, which contained just two nylon wash-and-wear shirts along with two pairs of trousers, underwear, and socks.

  But while Lindbergh’s severe interpersonal anxiety would wreak havoc on his family—in the 1950s, Anne, confused and infuriated by her husband’s erratic behavior and prolonged absences, went into a deep depression for which she sought psychoanalytic relief—it turned out to be essential in cementing his legend. Before Lindbergh, pilots were reluctant to try to win the $25,000 prize offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris without a copilot, as they worried about their ability to man flight controls for more than thirty hours. In contrast, Lindbergh was more nervous about sitting that long in close proximity to another human being. “By flying alone,” he wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis, “I’ve gained in…freedom. My movements weren’t restricted by someone else’s temperament, health or knowledge.… I’ve not been enmeshed in petty quarreling and heavy organizational problems.” For Lindbergh, human relationships would always be synonymous with Sturm und Drang. But by removing from his plane the weight of what he considered nonessentials, such as another passenger as well as a radio, the Lone Eagle increased its fuel capacity. As it turned out, the “two-ton flying gas tank” was exactly what “Lucky Lindy” needed to survive—the two-man crews were crashing left and right—and to march directly into the history books.

  A couple of months after the minute with President Wilson, C. A. Lindbergh pulled his son out of school again. The congressman was seeking the Republican nomination for senator, and he needed his trusty chauffeur to drive him to his speeches during the spring campaign.

  Catching the train in Washington on Saturday, April 22, 1916, father and son arrived in Minneapolis at 7 a.m. on Monday the twenty-fourth. Their first order of business was to pick up the family’s new car, having recently sold off Charles’s beloved Maria, which, due to its hand crank, was no longer state-of-the-art. At his son’s suggestion, C.A. decided to purchase a self-starting Saxon Six. When they arrived at the Saxon store, the salesman, as Charles recorded in his diary, “took me to a side street and taught me to run the car. The Saxon he said was the best car he ever rode in.” Over the next several weeks, Charles drove his father, who ran on an antiwar platform, some three thousand miles around the state. In the primary held on June 19, C.A. Lindbergh, who had decided to give up his House seat, suffered a crushing defeat, finishing a distant fourth. He would throw his hat into the ring a few more times—running in a gubernatorial primary in 1918 and another Senate primary in 1923—but he never came close to holding elective office again. After a series of business ventures failed, he was reduced to living in flophouses. “I am at my rope’s end,” he wrote to Charles in 1921, “for I can sell nothing.” When he died of a brain tumor in 1924, he was nearly destitute.

  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.