Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  After one more stop in Japan—in Fukuoka—the Lindberghs flew over the Yellow Sea. Miles before they reached the mainland, the color of the sea changed, mud from the Yangtze River besmirching the blue waters. The Yangtze was in high flood, the worst it had been in decades, leaving an estimated fifty million people homeless. The Lindberghs landed in Lotus Lake, just outside Nanking, where the river threatened the city’s great wall.

  As their plane was the only one in all of China with enough range to survey the outer limits of the floods, the Lindberghs offered their services to the National Flood Relief Commission. They met with the Chinese president, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and his Wellesley-educated wife for tea; but they canceled all other social functions so that they could devote themselves to the emergency at hand. The Lindberghs surveyed the lower Yangtze valley and found vast lakes among the narrow strips of rice fields, only to discover that those lakes were actually overflow from the river. Weighing the value of each pound of supplies that they could carry, the Lindberghs decided that medical supplies and a doctor who could service many were more valuable than food they might bring to a few.

  On September twenty-first, while trying to carry out his mission, Lindbergh experienced one of the most terrifying moments of his life. He took off from Nanking with Dr. J. Heng Liu, Director of the Department of Hygiene and Sanitation, and Dr. J. B. Grant, from the Rockefeller Institute of Peking. They were to inspect the larger cities in the flood area north of the Yangtze, delivering packages of serum and vaccine.

  Lindbergh splashed down on what had been rice fields, a few hundred yards from the wall surrounding Hinghwa. The entire city seemed to be sinking. A few sampans approached once they anchored, and Dr. Liu boarded one of them. Suddenly, hundreds of sampans skittered toward them from all directions. Lindbergh then made what he later realized was “the fatal mistake” of handing Dr. Liu one of the medicine packets. The Chinese, hungry and desperate, thought it contained food or money. An old woman grabbed one of the foot-square packages wrapped in white cloth and sat on it.

  By then the boats were jammed so close that one could jump from one to another—more than an acre of floating skiffs. Several Chinese bounded their way toward the plane. Dr. Liu got lost among the hysterical throngs, as Lindbergh turned all his attention to his plane. One boat with a partly open fire pushed directly beneath the plane’s left wing, which was made of wood. Dr. Grant yelled to Lindbergh to get a gun. He grabbed the Smith & Wesson .38 he had wedged beside his seat cushion, but he resisted showing it—“to draw one gun against hundreds of sampans, crowded with desperate people,” he thought, “seemed a fool’s move.” It would no doubt incite the mob, which possibly included somebody who would shoot back. When at last some Chinese, looking gaunt and grim, started to climb onto the pontoons and wings of his plane, Lindbergh feared damage beyond repair.

  He withdrew his revolver and fired once in the air. The people slowly pulled back, clearing a twenty-foot space around the plane. Dr. Liu was finally returned to the Sirius by sampan. As Dr. Grant pulled the anchor onto the wing, Lindbergh started the engine. He took off, with all the sampans attempting to follow. Fearing further episodes of uncontrollable hordes, Lindbergh and the doctors returned to Nanking. They all agreed not to mention the shooting, as “a false impression might have been given of the Chinese people.”

  Instead of dispensing medicine, the Lindberghs restricted the rest of their mission to gathering information. Anne flew while Charles sketched and mapped whole areas larger than the state of Massachusetts that were immersed. They moved upriver to Hankow, alongside the British airplane carrier Hermes, which served as their temporary home. Because the current of the river was too great for mooring the Sirius, the Hermes had offered to hoist the plane up from the water as they did their own seaplanes. On the day of their last survey flight, the Lindberghs sat in the plane as it was being lowered into the river. There proved to be too little slack in the cable to detach the hoisting hook as the current began to push the plane downstream. Lindbergh gunned his engine to maintain the plane’s equilibrium while they tried to release it from the hook, but he could not correct the situation. In the struggle between the current and the cable, one of the plane’s wings dipped into the water, flipping the plane onto its back. Charles shouted at Anne to jump in the river. After weeks of carefully brushing her teeth in boiled water, she found herself swallowing “buckets of this Yangtze mud.” A lifeboat downstream rescued them both from the river.

  The plane held up remarkably well, though its fuselage and one of its wings suffered enough damage to bring the Lindberghs’ journey to a halt. The Hermes offered to take them and their plane to Shanghai, where they planned to have the Sirius repaired so that they could continue around the world.

  On October fifth—sixth across the date line—while still aboard the carrier, Anne received a telegram from her sister Elisabeth that changed all their plans. Senator Dwight Morrow had died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. He had returned to Next Day Hill after speaking to the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York and had suffered a stroke in his sleep. He succumbed the next afternoon.

  Betty Morrow wanted the funeral ceremonies as simple as possible—without a formal procession, honorary pallbearers, or even a eulogy. Even so, her husband’s service at the First Presbyterian Church in Englewood, two days after his death, was attended by Vice President Curtis, along with Morrow’s Amherst classmate Calvin Coolidge, a quarter of the United States Senate, Ambassador Harry Guggenheim, Judge Learned Hand, Adolph Ochs, and Bernard Baruch. Four thousand mourners stood outside the church. A graveside service included only family members, including Evangeline Lindbergh, who came to Englewood to represent her son and daughter-in-law. Newspapers ran laudatory editorials and reverential cartoons. Local schools closed, many stores shut, and flags were lowered to half-mast.

  Elizabeth Morrow declined the Governor’s offer to complete her husband’s term in the Senate. After several large bequests to both Amherst and Smith and paying almost $1,000,000 in estate taxes (which reportedly put the debt-ridden state of New Jersey in the black), she inherited the bulk of the estate—close to $9,000,000, which yielded an annual income in interest and dividends from stocks and bonds of some $300,000. That was approximately what she needed to maintain the Morrow residences and to continue making extremely generous contributions to her favorite charities. With renewed vigor—often saying, “It’s what Dwight would want”—Mrs. Morrow would emerge as a national figure, one of the prime exemplars of twentieth-century women who devoted their lives to public service through volunteerism.

  Lindbergh arranged the return journey, sending a coded message (working back three words in a pre-designated dictionary) that he and Anne would arrive in three weeks. The Chinese government was so grateful for the Lindberghs’ work in China that Chiang Kai-shek awarded them the National Medal, observing that they had been the first aviators to fly from the New World to China. Japan had been just as elated with the Lindberghs’ visit. The American Ambassador wrote them, “Your coming at that time and the way that you and Mrs. Lindbergh comported yourselves as simple unassuming Americans left the happiest impression and made both of you, in the finest sense, ambassadors of good will.” Over the next few weeks, the Lindberghs received hundreds of letters and gifts from the Orient, including kimonos, rare dolls, lacquerware, bronzes, swords, china, vases, scrolls, carved ivory, and carved bamboo. The New York Times praised them lavishly on its editorial page.

  Instead of leaving their plane to be repaired in Shanghai, the Lindberghs had the China National Aviation company crate and ship it directly to Lockheed in Los Angeles. Meantime, they boarded a fast boat for Nagasaki, from where they trained across Japan to Yokohama. There they boarded the liner President Jefferson, which arrived at Vancouver on the evening of October twentieth. They flew commercially across country, arriving in New Jersey on October twenty-third.

  “It is good to be home,” Anne wrote
her mother-in-law upon settling back into Next Day Hill, “—and oh, the baby! He is a boy, a strong independent boy swaggering around on his firm little legs.” The toddler did not recognize either of his parents; but they made up for the time they had lost with him. Anne seemed surprised at how attentive her husband was to little Charlie—“playing with him, spoiling him by giving him cornflakes and toast and sugar and jam off his plate in the morning and tossing him up in the air. After he’d done that once or twice the boy came toward him with outstretched arms,” crying “Den!” (“Again!”). Charles went so far as to say he found his son “good-looking” and “pretty interesting.”

  Lindbergh was soon off on two weeks of Pan Am business again, flying in the southeast and Caribbean; but Anne decided to stay put for a while. She wanted to spend as much time as she could with Charlie. Even though he was six months younger than any of the other pupils at The Little School, the boy’s aunt Elisabeth insisted on his enrolling. She took him to school for a few hours every day, where the other children were drawn to his golden curls.

  While their new house still needed a few months of work, Anne and Charles took the baby on Halloween to spend their first night in Hopewell. Along unmarked, occasionally unpaved, roads they drove into the hills. It was a tricky route to navigate even in daylight. Approaching a little stone bridge over a brook, they turned left onto their property. The driveway serpentined for a kilometer to a clearing, where the house, with steep gables reaching three stories high, sat behind a low stone wall.

  The whitewashed fieldstone house with its thick slate roof had two wings running perpendicular to and projecting slightly in front of the central section. Through the front hall, one entered the living room, paneled in dark wood. To the left were a library with a dark stone fireplace and a guest room; to the right were the dining room and kitchen, which led to servants’ quarters and the large garage. Upstairs were the master bedroom, three guest rooms, and, in the back corner farthest from the entrance, the nursery. Pretty blue tiles decorated its fireplace; and a table, chair, and crib were already in place. The house had built-in closets and shelves and four bathrooms. There was enough architectural detail to make it attractive without being fancy. The electricity, plumbing, heating, and air conditioning in the house were all top-of-the-line, bringing its total cost to almost $80,000. For all that, none of the rooms had the spaciousness that the towering exterior suggested.

  They spent the weekend there, playing with Charlie on the terrace, which looked onto woods. As construction would continue until the end of January 1932, the Lindberghs continued living at Next Day Hill. But they drove to Hopewell almost every Saturday afternoon, returning to Englewood on Monday mornings. Although the idea of landscaping was still a few seasons off, Anne could not resist planting some special white tulip bulbs around the house before the ground froze.

  The Lindberghs did not go to the Hopewell house at all in the last part of December. Charles’s mother joined them in Englewood for Christmas, which everybody enjoyed. Charlie was especially happy with a present from Anne’s mother, a Noah’s Ark filled with pairs of animals. “He and Charles played with it for a long time,” Betty Morrow recalled, “making a great procession of the animals across the floor.” His father scarcely let a day go by after Christmas without testing him on their names; and by the new year, he could correctly select thirty animals from the ark.

  The day after Christmas, Charlie was playing with rubber toys in the bathroom when Betty Morrow heard a splash and a “spluttering howl.” He had fallen into the tub. Betty Morrow flew into a rage at Charles, sure that he had been ducking him “to test his courage.” Although she learned otherwise, Mrs. Morrow was right to feel concerned. Nurse Betty Gow had gotten to the baby before his grandmother, and she found “Colonel Lindbergh laughing his head off. He saw that the baby wasn’t hurt, just frightened. Still,” she remarked decades later, “there was something about the Colonel—that little bit of sadism.”

  It was the same kind of toughening he had received from his own father. When the boy began to suck his thumb, Lindbergh insisted he wear specially made thumbguards at night, metal devices like wire hoods over the corks of champagne bottles, which had fasteners that were pinned to the crib’s bedsheets. And one day that winter, Lindbergh built a huge pen of chicken wire outside their wing of Next Day Hill. When he had finished, he told Betty Gow to bundle Charlie up, to select one of his toys, and to place him in the pen “to fend for himself.” For hours, the little boy stayed there alone, sometimes crying. Betty Gow went to Anne, insisting they rescue him. Although Anne was close to tears, she said, “Betty, there’s nothing we can do.”

  On February 4, 1932, Charles Lindbergh celebrated his thirtieth birthday. The news about Lindbergh that week was that there was no news about Lindbergh—except that he was thankful to have slipped off the front page for a little while so that he could carry on with his business. “The world is left to guess whether there’ll be a frosted cake at the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home for Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., now a toddling youngster, to admire,” wrote one article. At last, Lindbergh felt that he was settling down to the kind of “real life” Anne had yearned for, the kind he had never known. While in the last year alone he had gathered twenty thousand miles’ worth of adventure, his twenties closed on a note of calm.

  After the trip to the Orient, Lindbergh’s popularity had risen again. Fifteen thousand people a day still admired his trophies in St. Louis—which now included his recent acquisitions from the Orient; five million people had paraded through the exhibit since its opening five years earlier. More than ever, he preferred that the public’s admiration remain from afar; and so he spent most of his days sequestered at the Rockefeller Institute. Despite the Depression, the Lindberghs were receiving almost $65,000 a year from interest and dividends and his consultancy fees. They had so successfully brought the boiling publicity pot down to a simmer, the press had not yet suspected that Anne was pregnant again.

  Anne had even housebroken her husband, ridding him of the only habits of his she could not abide—spitting and blowing his nose without a handkerchief. He now preferred to spend his evenings quietly at home, reading and listening to music. He adored being with his son, whom he addressed with a big “Hi! Buster” every time he saw him.

  For the first time in his life, Charles Lindbergh found joy in his family and comfort at home.

  10

  SOURLAND

  “… a tragedy took place that was to affect our lives forever.”

  —C.A.L.

  “GIVE THE LINDBERGH BABY A CHANCE!” BLARED A RECENT article in the National Affairs section of Time. The clarion call came in response to a widespread rumor in late 1931 that Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was deaf and had not learned to talk. “Cause of the affliction was supposed to have been the prenatal drumming of airplane motors in his ears, causing a trauma, while his mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, continued to fly during her pregnancy,” the article explained.

  The rumor was completely unfounded but so widespread that some of America’s most eminent journalists had to go on record to squelch it. Even Will Rogers felt compelled to write a column about a Sunday visit to Next Day Hill in late February, at which time he saw the Lindbergh baby:

  His dad was pitching a soft sofa pillow at him as he was toddling around. The weight of it would knock him over. I asked Lindy if he was rehearsing him for forced landings.

  After about the fourth time of being knocked over he did the cutest thing. He dropped of his own accord when he saw it coming. He was just stumbling and jabbering around like any kid 20 months old.

  The Lindberghs still had not moved into their new house outside Hopewell. Completing an uncomfortable first trimester of her new pregnancy, Anne was just as happy to be waited on in their suite at Next Day Hill. With the first intimations of spring, she found herself up and around, engrossed in two projects that had been offered to her husband and which he had proposed she pursue. The first was a public address
in behalf of flood relief in China; the second was a book about their recent journey to the Orient. Intimidated by the size of the latter task, she followed Charles’s suggestion of breaking the journey into sections and jumping into the “Baker Lake” episode, that moment when they left civilization behind and Anne found herself the first white woman to appear in that region of Northern Canada. “If I get enough written, soon enough, & it isn’t too bad,” Anne thought, “then we’ll talk to publishers.”

  For the most part, Anne devoted her time to little Charlie. She took to visiting the new house without nurse Betty Gow. “It is such a joy to hear him calling for ‘Mummy’—instead of ‘Betty’ once in a while!” she confessed to her mother-in-law. To the little boy, Charles was known as “Hi.” One day that February, while they were driving in New York, a car rear-ended them. Anne instinctively grabbed the baby, and Charles got out, while traffic stopped and irate drivers confronted each other. In the midst of the brouhaha, a small voice chirped, “Hi—all gone!”

  On the afternoon of Saturday, February twenty-seventh, one of Mrs. Morrow’s chauffeurs took Anne, the baby, and one of the maids from Englewood to Hopewell. Arriving at 5:30, they were met by Olly and Elsie Whateley, who had moved into the servants’ quarters. Anne changed and fed the baby, putting him in bed by seven o’clock. He seemed to be coming down with a cold, sneezing several times. Anne checked on him a few minutes later; and at about eleven o’clock, both she and Charles entered the nursery, to medicate the baby’s nose.

  Monday the baby was still sick. After lunch, Anne called Next Day Hill and told Betty Gow that they would not be returning to Englewood, as had become their routine. Little Charlie did not leave his room all day and neither did Anne, except for a few short walks, during which time she left the baby in Elsie Whateley’s care. Around seven, Lindbergh called from New York to say that he would be spending the night in town, not returning to Hopewell until the following night.