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 t
he 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.”
A couple of days later, Lindbergh came back to 44 Agnestrasse by himself, and invited Brigitte out for a stroll. Like Marietta, Brigitte was partially disabled due to a bout with tuberculosis in childhood. Her right leg was lame. She took Lindbergh’s arm, and they took the streetcar to Odeonsplatz in the heart of Munich. As with wife number one, the courtship was swift. As the pair walked past the lions near the Field Marshal’s Hall, he told Brigitte the old saw about how when a man is in love, he can hear the stone lions roar. Putting his arms around her, Lindbergh added, “And I fell in love with you.” A passionate kiss followed. Two days later, on March 21, 1957, on their second “ground date,” Lindbergh was ready to declare his intentions. While he was not free to marry, he wanted to cement their union with some jewelry. Wearing a black beret over his comb-over—his thinning blond hair was now mostly gray—Lindbergh took Brigitte to the exclusive Andreas Huber jewelry store—Munich’s Tiffany—where he bought her an elegant Swiss watch for 390 marks. She would proudly wear this gift on her wrist for the rest of her life. (She treasured the receipt, which Dyrk would later find among her papers.) Seeing the expensive watch on the arm of her sister, Marietta soon put two and two together. For the time being, however, Valeska remained in the dark about her American lover’s new lover.
In the early summer of 1957, Lindbergh returned to Munich, where he spent a few days alone with Brigitte in her apartment (Marietta was off in Baden-Baden, receiving medical treatment). A few weeks later, he set up a veritable ménage à quatre in his twelfth-floor pad on the Via Polvese in Rome. This was the rented love nest that he had heretofore used for trysts with Valeska. On this visit in July 1957, Lindbergh slept in one bedroom with Valeska. Marietta, who was in the Eternal City to take an art course, and Brigitte, who was on summer vacation, shared the other. Lindbergh’s love life now resembled the plot of a romantic farce dreamed up by the master of the genre, French playwright Georges Feydeau. While all three German babes with whom he was cohabitating had fallen for him, his official mistress count stood at two—the seduction of Marietta was still to come. Though both Brigitte and Marietta knew about Valeska—and Marietta knew about Brigitte—Valeska still assumed that she was his sole mistress. And Brigitte, who would repeatedly bend over backward to accommodate Lindbergh, did not voice any objections to the status quo. For the next few weeks, accompanied by his harem, Lindbergh gleefully pranced around town and went on beach outings. “[The summer in Rome] was a wonderful time,” he would write Brigitte later that year.
A few months later, after Lindbergh added Marietta to his list of conquests, he had to figure out how to smooth over the inevitable stickiness between the sisters. “We will work the various problems out,” he wrote to Brigitte in early 1958. Reassuring her of a positive outcome, he added that “with the right approach everyone can end up with great happiness.” For Lindbergh, right meant whatever would allow him to do whatever he wished. He was delighted that Brigitte continued to accept his double-dealing and triple-dipping without so much as a whimper; the same went for Marietta. In contrast, Valeska was initially irate when she found out that she was no longer his only European mistress. The passivity of both Hesshaimer sisters may have had something to do with their trying socioeconomic circumstances. In addition to their medical ailments, which had landed both in sanitariums for years at a time, they had endured a series of major traumas.
In 1936, before either was a teenager, their father, Adolf Hesshaimer, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. At the end of the war, Marietta and Brigitte emigrated from Romania to Germany, where they fell on hard times, as the Communists ended up commandeering the entire family fortune. After they became pregnant, the Hesshaimer sisters both became financially dependent on Lindbergh, who proved to be generous, eventually helping them to buy houses. On most visits, he arrived armed with gifts, including toy fire trucks and foreign coins for the children (whom he presumably saw as obsessive collectors in the making). To Brigitte and Marietta, Lindbergh was a godsend who served as an insurance policy against a possible fall from bourgeois respectability. Not so to Valeska, who, as a descendant of Prussian aristos, was a woman of independent means.
Brigitte, who also had had an abortion a few years before meeting Lindbergh, seems to have been even more slavishly devoted to her American sugar daddy than Marietta. In late 1962, after explaining to Brigitte that he had fathered a child by Marietta “because it was really important for her” (italics mine), Lindbergh asked Brigitte to travel to Marietta’s home in Switzerland to help her sister recover from the delivery. A month later, he wrote to thank Brigitte, noting that “[your assistance] touches me more deeply than I can explain to you.” The sexagenarian sex addict was finally getting some of the unconditional mother love that Evangeline Land had never sent his way. But by then, it was much too late. For the rest of his life, the self-absorbed celebrity would continue to burden his concubines with his neurotic tics. As part of the deal, Lindbergh insisted that both Brigitte and Marietta—but not Valeska, as she had her own funds—compile household account books in which they tracked every pfennig of the allowance that he provided. “A few days before every one of my father’s visits, my mother would take out all her receipts and start organizing them in order to update and balance the account books,” Dyrk told me. “During this time, she was often very nervous and grumpy.”
While Lindbergh was alive, Valeska’s two children were informed of his real identity, but not the five children born to the two Hesshaimer sisters. Brigitte told Dyrk and his siblings that he was in fact a writer named Careu—“Charles” in Hungarian—Kent, as
he alleged, though she did acknowledge that he had another family back in America. “When I was very little, I called him Father,” stated Dyrk. “And afterwards, I called him Careu.” To communicate with Lindbergh, who knew just a few words of German, Dyrk, whose English wasn’t very good during his father’s lifetime, relied on his mother as a translator. “As I got older,” Dyrk noted, “I found it surprising that even though my father was an author no one seemed to know, he was so well connected. I was amazed that he had met with people such as Henry Ford, the Kennedys, Neil Armstrong, and Richard Nixon.” Fearful that Dyrk and his younger siblings might make the connection in the weeks following Lindbergh’s death in August 1974, Brigitte removed pictures of their father from the family’s photo album. That summer, she also managed to prevent her three children, then aged between seven and sixteen, from seeing any of the obituaries that appeared in German newspapers and magazines and on German TV. However, about a decade later, a tearful Brigitte was forced to acknowledge the deception when confronted by a twenty-five-year-old Astrid, whose thorough library search on Careu Kent had come up empty.
It was Wednesday, April 5, 1961. Thirty-four springs after touching down in Le Bourget, the Pan Am consultant was a bit player in the aviation biz. The new air heroes were astronauts such as Russia’s Yuri Gagarin who, a week later, would become the first human to journey into space. Comparing the two pioneers, the New York Times reminded readers that month, “Each won a race to which the entire world was an audience.”
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