by Lynne Olson
For all her insecurity and outward conformity, Anne Morrow was desperate to assert herself, to break free of her rigid, tight-knit family circle. She tried to resist her parents’ wishes that she attend Smith, like her mother and sister before her. In the end, however, she enrolled there. “The chain was just too strong for her to break,” Constance later observed. “None of us really had a choice.”
Still, it was at Smith that Anne’s distinctive literary talent was first discovered and encouraged to flourish. Urged on by Mina Kirstein Curtiss, her creative writing professor, she contributed poetry and essays to the college’s literary publications and won Smith’s top awards for writing. Over and over in her poetry, she alluded to her desire to burst out of her cocoon, describing herself in one poem as “a brown-haired Quaker maiden” who yearned to be “a scarlet Spanish dancer.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh with her mother, Elizabeth Morrow.
In December 1927, during her senior year, Anne traveled to Mexico City to spend the Christmas holidays with her family. Earlier that year, her father had been appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico by his close friend, President Calvin Coolidge. Unlike his recent predecessors, who saw their main duty as serving the interests of U.S. oil companies in Mexico, Dwight Morrow was determined to improve the contentious relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor. To help achieve that goal, he invited America’s golden boy, Charles Lindbergh, to fly to Mexico City on a goodwill tour and spend Christmas with the Morrow family. Lindbergh accepted.
Although she didn’t know it yet, Anne was about to find her means of escape.
ONLY SEVEN MONTHS HAD passed since Lindbergh’s history-making flight, and he was at the apex of his fame. But, with the Morrows in Mexico, he acted more like an awkward schoolboy than a much-feted international celebrity. Although relaxed and confident in aviation circles, “this shy, cool boy,” as Anne described him in her diary, had few social graces when it came to mixing with strangers, particularly young women. He was the most eligible bachelor in the world, but, as far as anyone knew, he had never gone out on a single date. Wary and aloof, he regarded conversation, Anne wrote, “as though it were a business transaction or a doctor’s pill that he has to take.”
None of that mattered to twenty-one-year-old Anne, who, when asked in high school what her life’s ambition was, had replied: “I want to marry a hero.” For all Lindbergh’s gaucheness and lack of sophistication, she, like countless other young women, had become besotted with him, even before they met. A few months after their first encounter, she wrote in her diary: “Colonel L … is the last of the gods. He is unbelievable, and it is exhilarating to believe in the unbelievable.”
In the fall of 1928, after Anne’s graduation from Smith, Lindbergh renewed contact with her. On their first date, he took her flying over Long Island. He was as relaxed and natural in the air as he was awkward on the ground, and the two began to open up to each other. “I discovered that I could … say anything to him, that I wasn’t a bit afraid of him or even worshipful any more,” Anne exulted in a letter to Constance. “That Norse god has just gone.” He confided in her his dreams and hopes for the future of flying; she told him of her ambition to become a writer. Less than a month later, they were engaged.
Beneath Anne’s shy facade, Lindbergh discovered a love of nature, curiosity, and thirst for adventure that matched his own. She, for her part, “was given confidence, strength, and almost a new character” through her relationship with Lindbergh. “The sheer fact of finding myself loved … changed my world, my feelings about life and myself,” she later wrote. “The man I was to marry believed in me and what I could do.… He opened the door to ‘real life’ and although it frightened me, it also beckoned. I had to go.”
Yet, as much in love with him as she was, she was clear-eyed from the start about the vast differences between them. “He doesn’t seem to touch my life anywhere, really,” she noted. “I have more in common with anyone—the most distant of distant people—than with him.”
The differences began with their fathers. Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., who died in 1924, had been a radical populist Republican congressman who devoted his political career to a campaign aimed at breaking up the power and influence of the House of Morgan and other Wall Street banks, which he called “speculative parasites.” Although he didn’t see much of his father, Lindbergh greatly admired and respected him. By all accounts, the two were very much alike—in their chiseled good looks, independence, stubbornness, dislike of cities, and preference for rural and small-town values.
At heart, Lindbergh was a country boy, while Anne was a city girl. He was a college dropout who hated school and rarely picked up a book. Having been raised in an intellectual family, she prized education and reading. When she first told him she wanted to become a writer, he was astonished, exclaiming, “You like to write books? I like to live them.” She was emotional and sensitive; he was logical, practical, and often tone-deaf when it came to the feelings of others. “He is terribly young and crude in many small ways,” Anne wrote to Elisabeth before their wedding. “Sometimes he will say something that wrenches terribly.”
Anne had been swept away by “this amazing, overwhelming, and extremely forceful man,” but she was well aware, even in her starry-eyed state, that their life together would never be easy. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that “if you write me and wish me conventional happiness, I will never forgive you. Don’t wish me happiness—I don’t expect to be happy, but it’s gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor—I will need them all.”
FROM THE BEGINNING OF their marriage, Lindbergh made his young wife an equal partner in his life’s work—or so it appeared. After learning to fly a plane, operate a radio, and navigate, she joined him in his aerial explorations, traveling all over the world to map prospective air routes for the fledgling airline industry. She loved flying—the beauty and adventure of it—but even more important, the freedom it gave her and Charles. The sky turned out to be the only place she could truly be alone with him.
While her life seemed to have changed completely, she had in reality merely exchanged one cocoon for another. Isolated from normal human contacts by the constant pressure of Lindbergh’s fame, she had been warned by him to use extreme care in everything she said, did, or wrote. “The worst problem,” she told Constance, “is how to keep up a polite conversation and yet say nothing personal, bearing in mind every second that everything you say … may be repeated and made into a ‘story.’ ”
What she hated above all was the total lack of privacy. “Oh, it is brutal,” she lamented to her mother. “We never can catch people or life unawares.… It is like being born with no nose, or deformed—everyone on the street looks at you once and then again; always looks back—that second look, to leer.… That look, as though we were a public amusement, monkeys in a cage.” Whenever she and Lindbergh attended parties or other gatherings, she later told an interviewer, those present immediately lost their naturalness as soon as the Lindberghs entered the room: “They seemed to freeze, as though we carried a Medusa’s head.”
Anne’s dream of becoming her own person had also died aborning. She found she had exchanged the overpowering influence of her mother for domination by her husband—a control that she outwardly accepted while rebelling inwardly. In keeping with her fondness for romantic fairy-tale imagery, she later wrote that she had seen Lindbergh as “a knight in shining armor, with myself as his devoted page. The role of page came naturally to me.” But as the years passed, she increasingly resented that role, exploding at one point in her diary: “Damn, damn, damn! I am sick of being this ‘handmaid to the Lord’ … the ‘worthy helpmeet,’ a rather pale and good shadow in C.’s world.… Where is my world, and will I ever find it?”
The murder of the Lindberghs’ son only sharpened the differences between them. She was devastated by the loss of Charlie, her “gay, lordly, assured little boy.” Lindbergh was distraught, too,
but, unlike Anne, refused to show it. He disliked open displays of emotion and scolded Anne whenever she revealed her anguish. One day, during the stresses of the Hauptmann trial, he told her she was too controlled by her feelings and was, indeed, “a failure.”
Plunged into despair, she taught herself to cry without making a sound, to turn a blank face to the world. “I feel completely frustrated,” she exclaimed in her diary. “I am hemmed in on all sides and pounding against the walls … I must not talk. I must not cry … I must not dream. I must control my mind—I must control my body—I must control my emotions. I must put up an appearance, at least, of calm for C.”
Years later, Anne would write a novel entitled Dearly Beloved, two of whose major characters were clearly modeled on herself and Charles. About them, she wrote: “She didn’t know him at all. Oh, of course, she did; it was only that she couldn’t talk to him. She had another language: feelings, poetry, music.… He lectured; she listened. And her worries, her failures—she never brought them any more. Just hid them, like a bad arithmetic paper in school. He couldn’t bear her failures.… He would nail her down with the good strong nails of his logic. Bang, bang, bang, with the good hard hammer of his mind. Nailed to her faults forever.”
About Charles, the Lindberghs’ elder daughter, Anne, would note, “There were only two ways of doing things—Father’s way and the wrong way.” Anne’s sister, Reeve, remembered their father as “the most infuriatingly impossible human being I have ever known.” While blessed with humor, charm, and a “shy courtesy,” he was also “an angry, restless, opinionated perfectionist … obsessed with his own ideas and concerns.”
Close to a nervous breakdown in the mid-1930s, Anne Lindbergh gradually began to find a way out of her misery, thanks in part to Harold Nicolson, Dwight Morrow’s biographer. A deeply literate and cultured former British diplomat, who had written several highly regarded novels and works of nonfiction, Nicolson stayed at Elizabeth Morrow’s estate in New Jersey while researching the book about her husband, who had died in 1931. While there, he struck up a friendship with Anne, whom he described in a letter to his wife as “shy and retreating … with a tragedy at the corner of her mouth.”
Impressed by a National Geographic article Anne had written about a flight she and Charles had made in 1931 across Canada and Alaska to Japan and China, Nicolson praised her writing and encouraged her to continue it. Anne, elated by his praise and his recognition of “something inside me … that I have tried to ignore for fear of being hurt,” turned the article into a book. In June 1935, the publishing house Harcourt, Brace published North to the Orient, which won almost universal critical praise for its lyrical prose and became the country’s top nonfiction bestseller.
Its success prompted Anne to begin work on a second book, this one about a journey the couple took to Greenland, Europe, and Africa in 1933. From the beginning, Lindbergh had enthusiastically supported her writing and pushed her to succeed. At the same time, he made clear that he and his needs and desires took precedence over their children and her books. She was in perpetual conflict, angry and resentful, but “having been brought up to be ‘a good girl’ and to want to please everyone,” she usually acceded to his wishes. “Who am I to say, ‘No, I want my own life’?” she wistfully observed.
In the fall of 1935, however, she asserted herself enough to find a “room of her own,” a tiny Manhattan apartment she rented as a peaceful refuge to use for her writing. Less than two months later, Lindbergh abruptly informed her he had decided they must move to Europe, to get away from the prying press; she must be ready “to go by the end of the week—at 24 hours’ notice.” On December 21, the Lindberghs sailed for England.
ANNE HAD FEARED THE turmoil of another major disruption, writing in her diary that “all my life seems to be trying to ‘get settled’ and C. shaking me out of it.” To her delight, however, she found herself more settled in the havens she and Charles established in England and France than in any other place she had lived during her marriage. She finished her second book, entitled Listen! The Wind, at Long Barn, the house in rural Kent that she and Charles rented from Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In late 1938, the book was published to widespread acclaim—The New Yorker called it “a small work of art”—and it, like North to the Orient, reached the top of the bestseller list.
Until the Lindberghs’ sojourn in Europe, Anne had never shown much interest in the burning political and social issues of the day. Only when Charles became involved in the debate over whether Hitler should—or could—be stopped did she begin expressing her views, which, for the most part, were a parroting of her husband’s opinions. At a Paris dinner party, for instance, she argued that the Western allies had been so unfair to Germany in the post–World War I peace settlement that the Germans understandably felt the need to violate the Versailles Treaty, build up their forces, and take back the territory they had lost. To her mother, she wrote that Hitler “is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader—and as such rather fanatical—but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power.”
At the same time, however, her diaries were sprinkled with expressions of doubt about the correctness of such views, which differed so dramatically from those she had been brought up to hold. Unlike Lindbergh’s father, who had been a staunch isolationist before and during World War I, her parents were strong adherents of internationalism. “The talk I heard around the family table,” Anne later recalled, “was full of enthusiasm for Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points; the right of ‘self determination’ for nations, and ‘a new order of world peace.’ ”
In October 1938, she declared she had been “converted to the practical, hard facts” of political life by Charles, yet also lamented the Nazis’ use of terror, “their treatment of the Jews, their brute-force manner, their stupidity, their rudeness, their regimentation. Things which I hate so much that I hardly know whether the efficiency, unity, spirit that comes out of it can be worth it.”
After Germany swallowed up all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, she wrote in her diary: “This time you have gone too far. You are wrong. You are standing on a wrong and you (Germany) will ultimately fail because of it.… All nations break their word eventually, but the Germans break their word the moment it leaves their lips.” A month later, the Lindberghs returned to the United States.
FOR ANNE, LEAVING EUROPE turned out to be a much greater wrench than she could have imagined. Later she would write that she had not realized “how wrapped up in Europe” her plans, dreams, and hopes for the future were, “how Europe is the mecca, the spiritual home, of so much I love.”
Yet her return to America provided one consolation: a reunion with her mother and the rest of the Morrow family. For all her conflicted, rebellious feelings about Elizabeth Morrow, Anne remained very close to her. At her mother’s invitation, she, Charles, and their two sons lived at Elizabeth’s New Jersey estate while they looked for a home of their own.
There had always been a certain amount of tension between the strong-willed Elizabeth Morrow and her equally domineering son-in-law. While she was impressed by his accomplishments and fame, she had never thought he was good enough for Anne. “Lindbergh is really of a lower social stratum,” a friend of the Morrows told Harold Nicolson, “and they treat him with aloof politeness.” In reality, the friend added, the Morrows’ son-in-law was “no more than a mechanic, and had it not been for the Lone Eagle flight, he would now be in charge of a gasoline station on the outskirts of St. Louis.”
But it wasn’t just social snobbery that fueled Elizabeth Morrow’s sometimes difficult relationship with Lindbergh. She was bothered by what she considered his rigidity—his insistence, for example, that people made too much of special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings. Such celebrations, he thought, were unduly sentimental, and he frowned on Anne or anyone else taking part in them. But most of all, Elizabeth disapproved of the way Charles treated her daughter. “Charles isn’t capable of understa
nding her—the beauty of her soul and mind,” she once wrote. She felt he had forced Anne to adopt a dual identity—the person she really was and the person Charles wanted her to be. “He loves her, but he wants to reform her—make her over into his own practical scientific mold. Poor Charles! What a condemnation of him!”
To Anne’s distress, the relationship between her husband and mother grew even more strained after the Lindberghs’ return from Europe. Elizabeth, who strongly believed that the United States must help Britain and France, disagreed sharply with Lindbergh’s isolationist views. Anne found herself in the middle, once again caught in the “eternal struggle of what I must be for C., and what I must be for Mother, and what I must be for myself.”
Constance Morrow Morgan.
Elizabeth, as it turned out, was not the only close relative of Anne’s to be a fervent interventionist. Her beloved younger sister, Constance, known as “Con,” had married a Welshman, who was about to become one of the British government’s key propagandists in the United States. Con, in turn, would soon emerge as an active partner in that effort.
DESPITE THE SEVEN-YEAR DIFFERENCE in their ages and great dissimilarity in their personalities, Anne and the petite, blond Con had always been extraordinarily close. Anne might have had ambivalent feelings—love vying with envy and a sense of inferiority—about her mother and elder sister, but she never felt ambivalent about happy-go-lucky, confident Con, the only member of the Morrow family to have a relaxed, teasing relationship with Lindbergh. “She rags him about his fame complex,” Harold Nicolson noted. “He just grins at her. She says, ‘Well, Colonel Lindbergh, it’s no use turning on the Lindbergh smile famous on two continents in order to impress your little sister-in-law. It doesn’t work.’ ”
