Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  She analyzed her every mood with a critical eye. She learned to put herself down before anybody else could, preparing herself and her family for failures then surprising everybody with successes. She became a chronic apologizer, usually unnecessarily. Such self-involvement left her shy but strong. “She was no shrinking violet,” remarked one of her oldest friends, “but a real hot-house orchid—one of those rare, complex flowers that look quite fragile but are really quite durable.” During her adolescence, Anne developed fortitude from her anger and compassion from her pain.

  “Anne was the one student with a soul,” recalled one of her friends from Miss Chapin’s School in New York City. She was part of a spirited group of teenage girls who came from the best homes and vacationed in the right places. “Anne-Pan” Morrow never lobbied to be their leader; she hung back, quietly attracting them with her selflessness and modesty until they all followed. Far from being antisocial, Anne enjoyed the appreciation from friends that she did not get from her family, especially her mother. She became the best letter-writer of the group, invariably opening with an apology for being so tardy and closing with an apology for being so wordy. It was a subtle trap she set, for most of the replies promptly dismissed the false defects and made way for even greater praise. For the rest of her life, Anne used the same technique, rendering herself incapable of asking directly for what she wanted.

  During her five years at Miss Chapin’s, Anne attended enough cultural events in New York to realize that her provincialism was threatening to turn her into a snob, as it did her sister Elisabeth. Her poems and stories of the period were full of yearning, for “adventures I have never followed” and “countries I have never seen.”

  Anne thought she stood a better chance of attaining her goals by breaking ranks with her family. That meant following most of her friends to Vassar College, not Smith. “I want to do something different,” she wrote her sister Elisabeth. “I want to start somewhere else. I want to do something entirely independent.”

  Anne graduated from Miss Chapin’s in 1924 the class star. She was captain of the field hockey team, the most accomplished contributor to the literary magazine, and student council president. At the graduation dinner Miss Chapin handed each of the young ladies a questionnaire, which asked: “What is your life ambition?” Forty years later Mary “Melly” Walker could not remember her own response, but she claimed to remember Anne Morrow’s: “I want to marry a hero.”

  Finding comfort putting others on pedestals, Anne developed crushes—on writers Edna St. Vincent Millay or Michael Strange one week, Corliss Lamont the next. “It’s a strange sort of complex,” her sister Elisabeth observed in her diary, “and I wish she would get over it. I hate to have her working herself up into a nervous state …” In the end, Anne enrolled at Smith College. “The chain was just too strong for her to break,” her sister Constance explained. “None of us really had a choice.”

  Difficult though Smith was, Anne Morrow flourished there. Taking courses in creative writing while majoring in English literature, Anne fell under the tutelage of Mina Kirstein Curtiss, who became her newest hero. The daughter of Louis Kirstein, one of the partners in Filene’s department store, Mrs. Curtiss was a Smith alumna. Jewish and highly cultured—her brother Lincoln would found the New York City Ballet and her brother George would publish The Nation—she received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University, before joining the faculty at Smith. Briefly married, she poured her passion into her own writing—books on Proust, Bizet, and Degas—and that of her students. From their first meeting to the end of Mina Curtiss’s life, Anne found her “an inspiring teacher, setting standards of scholarship, of creativeness, and of excellence in writing for a generation of students.” She guided Anne Morrow toward discovering her own clear and precise literary voice.

  Bolstered by Mina Curtiss’s approval, Anne tried to break out of her family’s restrictive mold. Her classmate Elizabeth Bacon recalled one of those indulgent sophomore-year conversations on the top floor of Emerson House, one in which the girls were talking about poverty, a subject neither of them knew anything about. Suddenly, Anne said, “Bacon, I want to roll in the mud!” Her undergraduate poems, full of allusions to birds and suggestions of budding sexuality, reveal her desire to venture into the real world. She often fixated on another image, the unicorn—a symbol of chastity and purity. Read one of her verses of the period:

  Everything today has been

  heavy and brown.

  Bring me a Unicorn

  to ride about the town.

  Although Anne persisted in punishing herself with put-downs about her physical and mental shortcomings, she bloomed into an alluring young woman, with radiant blue eyes, a sensitive mouth, and a genuine inner glow—“an aura,” people would say about her for the rest of her life. She and Elisabeth attended parties together, and their parents often brought eligible young men home to meet them. The sisters divided the potential beaux into four categories—Sparklers, Twinklers, Worthies, and Lumps. The Morrow girls were most often attracted to the Twinklers—though they were just as happy with Worthies and always felt comfortable around Lumps—“usually other girls’ cousins brought in at the last minute.” Sparklers, on the other hand, were few and far between; as one of her later fictional characters would note: “Mother said they were unsteady and would never settle down.”

  Among Anne’s first callers was Corliss Lamont. After failing in his pursuit of Elisabeth, he fell deeply in love with Anne’s lambent beauty and smoldering nature. She too resisted his amorous intentions, though she was impressed that he had already become a free thinker, departing radically from the conservative politics of his wealthy family.

  Within a few years, Corliss would embark upon a career as a writer and philosopher, passionate in his left-wing politics. Shortly before marrying, he could not resist telling Anne about his fiancée, “I do not yet love her as much as I once loved you.” He would carry a torch for Anne for the rest of his life, through another three marriages.

  The Morrows’ world got turned upside down in 1927, once President Coolidge lured his Amherst classmate from the private-business sector into becoming Ambassador to Mexico. The appointment hit Betty Morrow hardest, because giving up his partnership at J. P. Morgan also meant postponing the building of her dream house in Englewood. The architect Chester Aldrich—brother of her dearest friend since college, Amey—had already drawn plans for a Georgian manor. “I wish I thought it was an adventure!” she complained to her diary, but she expressed only enthusiasm about the posting to her husband. Although conflicted, he was ready to make the change. He had long wanted to serve his country; and he had made more than enough money to work for the public good for the rest of his life. In his twelve years at Morgan, he had amassed a fortune in cash, securities, and real estate worth close to ten million dollars. To prove to his wife that he would always consider Englewood their home, he ordered the building of the grand house on a hill in the backwoods of Englewood to proceed.

  From his first “ham and eggs” breakfast with President Calles, relations between Mexico and the United States improved, resonating long after his mission had ended. Betty Morrow provided the ballast in his career, as she gamely moved to Mexico and learned Spanish. She and Dwight enrolled Constance in school there. Elisabeth, then teaching in Englewood, took a leave of absence, so that she could partake in the experience. Dwight Jr. remained at Groton, where his moods began to oscillate wildly and he was hearing voices out of nowhere talking about him. Within the year, he would suffer a complete mental breakdown.

  Anne remained, in her words, “the youngest, shiest, most self-conscious adolescent that—I believe—ever lived.” Still finding herself, she continued to search for heroes. In the spring of 1927, Erasmus caught her fancy; and she was, in fact, writing a paper about him that May twentieth, at the end of her junior year at Smith. The next day, Anne walked by the infirmary, where her friend Elizabeth Bacon was in bed with a case of measles. Anne
animatedly shouted into the infirmary window, “Bacon, Bacon, a man has flown the Atlantic. His name is Charles Lindbergh. He flew all alone. He has landed in Paris.”

  Seven months later, Colonel Lindbergh made his way to the United States Embassy in Mexico City. Dwight and Betty Morrow had entertained him for a week that December before their second daughter arrived by train on her Christmas vacation from Smith. Those seven days, between the twenty-first and twenty-eighth, completely shook her world. “This was to be an objective diary,” Anne wrote at the first possible opportunity after reaching her parents’ new residence. “It stops here!

  I don’t care how much I rave if only I could get down to keep a little the feeling of what has happened this last week. I wish to heavens I had written it down as it happened, but I was too moved—and too ashamed of my emotion.

  For the first time, Anne surrendered to living in the moment.

  Lindbergh’s presence threw her into a state of complete distraction, causing her to stammer and stumble at every turn. Her older sister, on the other hand, rose to every occasion, uninhibitedly making delightful conversation. “Why is it that attractive men stimulate Elisabeth to her best and always terrify and put me at my worst!?” Anne wondered.

  On Christmas Eve, the Morrows threw a merry staff party, thirty-three for dinner. Entering the dining room, Colonel Lindbergh went looking for his place card next to Anne’s. “Well, the older has sat next to me,” she imagined his thinking, “I suppose it’s the second one’s turn. I’ll have to sit next to her tonight.” But his card was not there, and while looking for hers, she bumped right into him. They exchanged embarrassed apologies.

  After dinner there was dancing. “He didn’t dance but stood apart and watched—not with envy, but with a kind of dazed pleasure,” she noted. From afar, she instinctively knew where he was all the time. After dancing a Virginia reel, Anne collapsed on a couch in the hall with a cousin and a few friends of her brother—Worthies verging on being Lumps. They dressed Anne up with a comb and mantilla and shawl, putting a red carnation in her hair. “I felt glowing and frivolous,” Anne confided to her diary that night, “—until suddenly I saw the Colonel behind me and I took them off, feeling silly, and tore the carnation out of my hair.”

  “She should have been born in Spain, shouldn’t she?” one of them said to Lindbergh. Strangely, Lindbergh felt embarrassed too and could barely agree. Anne sat there a little longer, saying nothing until she quietly excused herself and went to bed. When Anne did find herself seated next to Lindbergh at lunch the next day, she became tongue-tied. She did not know that Lindbergh appreciated the silence and that for the first time he felt at home with a girl.

  Christmas afternoon, the Morrows spoke of driving to Xochimilco, a town famed for its floating gardens. Lindbergh longed to accompany them but said his presence would spoil their day because of the inevitable crowd. Anne said, “I feel as though the nicest thing we could do for you would be to leave you alone.” But Lindbergh chose to tag along. They spent the afternoon in relative peace, punting in a barge down flower-filled lagoons lined with calla lilies and poplars. Most of the people who recognized Lindbergh kept their distance. For a few hours, he had been able to enjoy himself like a normal young man.

  The next day, Lindbergh took all the Morrow women for a ride in the five-passenger silver Ford plane that had flown his mother to Mexico. Anne sat right behind Lindbergh and was torn between experiencing the flight and examining the pilot. They flew over the embassy, past a lake, up toward the snowcapped mountain Ixtaccihuatl. “It was a complete and intense experience,” Anne wrote afterward. “I will not be happy till it happens again.”

  Although she never said as much, Anne had fallen in love with Charles Lindbergh that Christmas. It was clear reading between the lines of her diary. She repeatedly told herself how insignificant she must have seemed to him and that she should be grateful just for the privilege of having known him. Returning to Smith College for her last semester, Anne felt as though that one week had changed her more than two decades of education. “Clouds and stars and birds,” she wrote, “—I must have been walking with my head down looking at the puddles for twenty years.”

  Anne became obsessed with Lindbergh. She devoured every book and article she could find about him. Every boy she dated now made her think, “there are thousands of him (thank God for one Colonel L.).” One Saturday night that spring she ran alone in the rain to the theater in town where she watched a documentary called “Forty Thousand Miles with Colonel Lindbergh.” Then, she returned to her dormitory room to read a story in The Saturday Evening Post, which she had stashed away, “Galahad Himself.” Its handsome flying hero—Robert Boyd—blushed around women and did not smoke, drink, or dance … and was obviously based on Lindbergh. “Boyd” became her code-name for Lindbergh in her letters to her sisters, just as she had named the family station wagon “Memphis” in honor of the ship that brought him home from Europe. Between reading Chaucer and Robert Frost that year, Anne pored over aviation magazines.

  “Colonel L. is ‘le seul saint devant qui je brûle ma chandelle’ [“the only saint before whom I light a candle”],” Anne wrote in her diary, trying to explain to herself why she had become so taken with this new reading matter; “—the last of the gods. He is unbelievable and it is exhilarating to believe in the unbelievable. Then because all that world is so tremendous, new and foreign to me, I could not get further from myself than in it.” She found a man with a plane in Northampton who took her flying. Afterward, she gushed in her diary, “He will never know the joy and life it gave me.”

  CELEBRITY WITHOUT PURPOSE seemed pointless to Lindbergh; and commerical aviation became his crusade. “America has found her wings, but she must yet learn to use them,” he wrote of that year. During this “period of adjustment,” nobody did more to advance that cause than Charles Lindbergh. In the two years after grounding the Spirit of St. Louis, few aspects of American aviation went without the advice or assistance of “The Lone Eagle.”

  Lindbergh’s new goal was to establish transcontinental passenger airline service, connnecting New York with California. Realizing this vision would require speculators with enough foresight to overlook a few years of losses before their million-dollar investments might yield a profit, he returned to his St. Louis backers—Harold Bixby, Harry Knight, and Bill Robertson. Together, they descended upon the one man in the country they thought could satisfy all their business needs.

  “The genius of Henry Ford,” Lindbergh would later write of the inventor-industrialist, “did not depend much on logic for his business ventures. Intuition played a major part in his phenomenal success.” After one of his airplanes crashed, killing its pilot, Ford divined a new plane- building policy. From that day forward, Ford aircraft would be monoplanes (because they were “simpler”) made of metal (because “metal’s the thing of the future”) with more than one engine (“because we aren’t going to have any more forced landings”). In one synapse, Ford had leaped to the next generation in aircraft manufacturing. Lindbergh wished to make that leap as well, joining forces as well as resources.

  Ford was willing to lend his name and sell his planes but not to invest in the proposed company. He believed in the future of aviation, and even ran the Detroit-Chicago mail route to learn more about such an enterprise. But he also believed in the division of labor and that his personnel were tooled to manufacture not operate. With the most famous pilot and manufacturer of motors on board, the partners next hoped to team with the man who had become the foremost tycoon in aviation.

  A Canadian-born wheeler-dealer, Clement M. Keys rose through the penny-ante world of small-time aviation to become chief executive of the Curtiss Airplane Company. A whiz at trades and mergers, he also gained control of a holding company which owned an operation called Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT). Keys was interested in Lindbergh’s proposition and suggested that the men from St. Louis approach the railroads, which had an operations system already in
place—timetables, ticket-taking, terminals, tracks to follow where navigation was difficult, and trains on which to put passengers in bad weather. He arranged for a meeting with William W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  As this new flying venture would involve rail service until the entire route could be lit at night, and because the “Pennsy” only ran as far west as St. Louis, each side needed the other to realize its belief in Manifest Destiny. For a twenty percent interest in the company, the Pennsy came on board. With paid-in cash capital of $5,000,000, Keys was named president of the company, and Lindbergh chairman of its Technical Committee.

  Lindbergh spent most of the next year establishing the TAT route. In a “sister ship” of the Spirit of St. Louis, he selected the ten intermediate points between the coasts, then repeatedly checked each stop to ensure that the route was safe and worth the money people would spend to save a few days of travel. Most of his suggestions became the standard for aviation in the United States and, subsequently, around the world. In many cities, he helped create the models for their first modern airports.

  Few of the stops had suitable landing fields for the ten trimotored, 1200 h.p. monoplanes Lindbergh ordered from Ford. Columbus, Ohio, for example, had to build and equip an airport of seven hundred acres, to accommodate the new airline. To do so, the city had to pass a bond issue of $850,000 and the Pennsylvania Railroad had to develop a new rail station at that point on their tracks nearest the flying field, with platforms and crossovers so that passengers could easily transfer between planes and trains. Lindbergh believed that passengers would still “prefer the additional comfort of a railroad pullman to the time saved by night flying.” But already anticipating the time when the planes could fly through the night, Lindbergh ordered the lighting of three hundred miles of airway between Waynoka, Oklahoma, and Clovis, New Mexico. New airports had to be built and completely outfitted in both those cities as well as Winslow and Kingman, Arizona. While Los Angeles had more than thirty landing fields in its metropolitan area, Lindbergh selected a private airport in Glendale because it was most accessible to the centers of population and least affected by the region’s “peculiar fog situation.”