Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Schwarzkopf even pinned hopes on a studious man named Arthur Koehler, the head of the Forest Service Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture in Madison. Schwarzkopf had sent him splinters of the wood in the kidnap ladder, enough to allow Koehler to believe he could deduce the builder’s identity. While Koehler’s area of expertise was not considered an exact science, he had already proved himself a reliable court witness on several occasions. He had testified that lumber had specific markings as individualized as fingerprints, from which he could trace its history—where it was grown, where it was milled, where it was sold.

  The Curtis trial over, the Lindberghs gave the house in Hopewell one more chance. Charles talked constantly about its virtues in design and construction as though trying to convince himself. Anne settled into a routine of piano lessons and walks, even writing—making attempts to chronicle their trip to the Orient. Every time they drove into town, however, they had to pass the spot on the hill where their baby’s remains had been found.

  Concerned with making the Hopewell house safe enough for his wife and expected baby, Lindbergh seized upon the idea of a police dog. He and Anne located a breeder of German shepherds, who singled out his most intelligent animal—named Pal. Charles, who had a way with dogs since childhood, approached the “wolf” and tried to pat him, which prompted Pal to bare his teeth and growl. Lindbergh was impressed.

  The trainer said it would take a fortnight before Pal would accept Lindbergh as his master; and for the first few days, the breeder warned, Lindbergh must not approach him alone, for the dog would maul him. Each caveat pleased Lindbergh even more. The breeder drove up the next day in a small paddy wagon, with Pal bolted inside. They released him into one of the garages at Hopewell, which had been turned into a large cage with heavy wire. After the trainer left, Lindbergh let their two small dogs, Skean and Wahgoosh, run over to Pal so that they could get used to him. Charles followed. By the end of the day, he had the German shepherd obeying every signal. Lindbergh renamed the dog Thor.

  More than security, Thor brought joy into the Hopewell house. Charles spent most of the next week teaching him new tricks and commands. He trained the dog to fetch specific items by name, including the leash which Lindbergh would put on Skean and Wahgoosh so that Thor could walk them. The dog became fiercely protective of Anne, awakening her in the mornings by putting his nose on her side of the bed and seldom leaving her side during the day. “The devotion of this dog following me everywhere is quite thrilling,” Anne wrote in her diary, “like having a new beau.”

  By August 1932, the Lindberghs stopped pretending about their feelings toward the house in Hopewell and moved—at least temporarily—back to Next Day Hill. No sooner had they settled into their wing of the mansion, with their own staff, than their little dogs ran away. In his pursuit, Charles found eight reporters chasing after him. The episode made Anne adopt Charles’s point of view, that were it not for the press attention that surrounded them, “we might still have him.”

  On the fifteenth of August, Lindbergh appeared at a New Jersey airfield and tested an all-metal low-winged Northrop monoplane. It was the first time in the three months since the discovery of his son’s body that Lindbergh had flown. He went up for an hour, telling the inquiring press that his short flight was of “no particular significance.” What he told nobody except his wife was that he flew over the Atlantic Ocean, several miles out to sea, where he strewed his firstborn’s ashes.

  Later that night, just after midnight, Anne’s labor pains began. In light of the public hysteria of the last six months, the Lindberghs and their doctors had agreed that it was best for her to deliver the baby in the privacy of the Morrow apartment in the city. So, at 3:45 that morning, she and Charles and her mother drove from New Jersey through the deserted streets to 4 East Sixty-sixth Street. The obstetrician, Dr. E. M. Hawks, the anesthesiologist, Dr. Flagg, and a nurse arrived moments later.

  Flagg immediately administered gas, but Anne suffered nonetheless for the next three and one-half hours. She seemed always conscious of Charles’s presence, as he held her hand, stroking her wrist with his forefinger. She was not aware that she began to hemorrhage during the labor, and Dr. Hawks thought, “Oh my God, I’ve killed the second Lindbergh baby!” Flagg put her completely under, and a half hour later, she gave birth to a healthy seven-pound, fourteen-ounce baby—with big eyes, the Morrow nose, and the Lindbergh dimple in the chin.

  All that day, Anne kept sighing that the baby was “all right,” until Charles said, “He has a wart on his left toe.” Such teasing was an obvious expression of his own relief. “You’ll wear the baby out, looking at it,” he said. But she did not want to dismiss her feelings of joy so readily. “The spell was broken by this real, tangible, perfect baby … a miracle,” she wrote. “My faith had been reborn.”

  In an effort to see that the hysteria that surrounded his first child did not recur, Lindbergh issued an annnouncement of the birth of his second son to the press along with a request:

  Mrs. Lindbergh and I have made our home in New Jersey. It is naturally our wish to continue to live there near our friends and interests. Obviously, however, it is impossible for us to subject the life of our second son to the publicity which we feel was in a large measure responsible for the death of our first. We feel that our children have a right to grow up normally with other children. Continued publicity will make this impossible. I am appealing to the press to permit our children to lead the lives of normal Americans.

  Lindbergh let the press believe the baby had been born in Englewood. He filed the birth certificate with no name; and he diplomatically called the Times and the Tribune to inform them of this fact. He also said that there would be no photographs released.

  Most of the reputable newspapers in the country honored Lindbergh’s wishes for privacy. Some even wrote to assure the family that they would make no effort to obtain pictures of any of them and that they would write no stories on the Lindberghs other than those based on officially issued statements. Lindbergh was pleased to read several articles about Thor and his great ferocity.

  One night after they had returned to the safety of Next Day Hill, however, a local half-wit appeared at the new baby nurse’s upstairs window. Anne became as apprehensive as ever. Charles routinely called the police and calmly suggested that the baby not sleep alone, not even in the daytime on the porch. “We give in,” Anne noted in her diary. “Will this haunt us forever?”

  The following week, Anne went into the city to see Dr. Hawks and to treat herself to a new hat. At Macy’s she walked by a mirror and could hardly believe how old, pale, and worried she looked. Suddenly other shoppers caught sight of her and literally mobbed her. Anne fled.

  Charles refused to let his wife submit to her fears. He would accept a life of precaution but never one of paranoia. Although the season in North Haven was winding down, he thought it best to take Anne there, even though it meant leaving their one-month-old behind. He trained Thor to “Go mind the baby,” which meant lying by his crib and accosting anyone who approached other than Elsie Whateley and the nurse, who slept with him every night. At least two males of the domestic staff were ordered to remain close to him at all times, and a watchman was hired. Anne was naturally reluctant to abandon the baby, still unnamed; but Dr. Van Ingen thought it best not to move him from Englewood. Charles flew his wife from the Long Island Country Club on the afternoon of September thirteenth in his Bird biplane.

  They intended to be gone but ten days, but they stayed sixteen. When he and Anne were not playing tennis or hiking on their Big Garden Island, Charles flew, chopped trees, and read. Anne found added strength in her family—Dwight Jr., home from an archaeological trip to Europe before returning to Amherst, Con about to return to Smith, and Elisabeth, back from England to announce her engagement to a Welshman, Aubrey Niels Morgan, whose family owned David Morgan, Ltd, a department store in Cardiff. She planned to live in Wales. Without saying it outright, Lindbergh experienced for the fir
st time the healing powers of a family in a time of distress. He filled his wife’s heart with joy one night in North Haven when he commented, “I don’t know any place I like as much as this now.”

  The Lindberghs returned to Englewood invigorated. They settled, at last, on a name for the new baby—Jon—which they came across in a book of Scandinavian history. It had no association to either of their families, was uncommon but not strange, and—as Charles liked to point out—“It is phonetic spelling!” He sarcastically added, “Let’s see what people say about it! It will be a scream to hear them speculating about where we got it from.”

  The Lindberghs continued to reassemble the pieces of their lives. He returned to Dr. Carrel’s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute and to his work as technical adviser in the aviation industry. He also proposed donating the house in Hopewell to the state of New Jersey for use as some kind of children’s home. It seemed the only way, Anne noted, “to make it up to the boy.”

  The dreadful year ended on a note of hope. The Lindberghs and Morrows gathered for a wedding three days after Christmas, on a Wednesday afternoon at 4:30, at which time Elisabeth Morrow married Aubrey Morgan. A thick fog settled over Englewood, but inside the candle-lit library at Next Day Hill, the few dozen guests felt warm and cheery. Charles liked the groom very much and appreciated the company of another man in the Morrow matriarchy. The newlyweds embarked on a honeymoon in the south of France before settling in Cardiff.

  Several weeks of socializing made the Lindberghs feel they were returning to normal life. They attended a public banquet at which Charles accepted a belated decoration from the government of Romania, a dinner with George and Amelia Earhart Putnam, and another with Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson—whom the Morrow family was considering to write the official biography of Dwight Morrow. But all feelings of security were illusory. The barking of dogs in the night was enough to keep them both awake.

  With the first anniversary of the kidnapping, newspapers recycled the story. Articles recapitulated the crime and editorials reprehended the New Jersey State Police. Concealed from the public, because they might interfere with attempts to crack the unclosed case, were kidnap threats against Jon, which the Lindberghs were receiving. In his fight to keep his wife from sinking into depression at Next Day Hill, Lindbergh resorted to his lifelong elixir—travel.

  A successful ten-day car trip to Detroit—during which Anne disguised herself with glasses and a blond wig and he slicked down his hair with a washable black rinse—encouraged the Lindberghs to travel more. “C. felt entirely free for the first time in six years,” Anne observed, “his freedom handed back to him. And to feel it is always there now, a hidden reserve. We can get away!” Charles made plans for their next trip.

  Aviation had thus far weathered the Depression; and Lindbergh—as Technical Director of TWA, “The Lindbergh Line”—had not inspected any of its air routes in more than a year. On April 19, 1933, he and Anne left Newark for Burbank, where they intended to pick up their Lockheed Sirius, reconditioned after its 1931 spill into the Yangtze. They flew to Camden, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, discovering a trail of new transcontinental beacons. St. Louis felt like a homecoming for both of them, as friends as well as fans turned out to greet them. Lindbergh expressed great admiration for the city’s new terminal building and glassed-in control tower; and he visited the exhibition of his decorations and trophies at the Missouri Historical Society, adding a few more to the collection and expressing concern over their security. They spent the night with Philip Love; and in front of his old flying mate, he reverted to an immature teenager, bullying Anne in front of him, dragging her up to bed by one ear. (She learned the only way to deal with such behavior was to play along—though she did once find him so exasperating that she dumped a pitcher of water on his head.)

  Crowds once again welcomed the Lindberghs every time they landed, glorying in having the gods back in their Heaven. Charles and Anne enjoyed a week in Los Angeles, then headed east, happy to be in their familiar orange-red and black plane, fitted once again with wheels where the pontoons had been. On May sixth, they got caught in a dust storm over the Texas panhandle and spent the night inside the plane. Six planes searched for them while they were “missing.” They hit page one of The New York Times when they were “found.”

  Once back in Englewood, Lindbergh planned their next trip, this one equal in scope to their trip to the Orient. The air routes of the world were “entering their final stage of development,” Lindbergh noted. “The countries had already been crossed and the continents connected. It remained only for the oceans to be spanned. Their great over-water distances constituted the last major barrier to the commerce of the air.” Thus, this trip’s official purpose was to survey potential transatlantic air routes and bases between North America and Europe. There were three alternatives—the Greenland-Iceland route in the north, the Newfoundland-Ireland route in the center, and the Bermuda-Azores route in the south. The northern route was most “tantalizing” to Lindbergh, for it offered the greatest safety net of land below, never more than seven hundred miles over water.

  At a factory in Caldwell, New Jersey, Lindbergh modified his Lockheed Sirius. Mechanics installed a new 710 h.p. Wright Cyclone F engine and a Hamilton Standard controllable pitch propeller with two positions. These changes increased the range of the plane and the load with which it could take off from water. After testing the plane on July first, Lindbergh flew to the Edo factory on Long Island, where the wheels were once again replaced with pontoons. As with their previous expedition, the Lindberghs financed the flight themselves. Pan American supplied the best radio available at the time and sent a ship to Greenland to serve as an operations base.

  Selecting equipment for this trip was at least as difficult as their 1931 voyage to the Orient. Although they would be leaving New York in midsummer, the Lindberghs had no itinerary—only the probability that they would travel both farther north and south than ever before. Again they would have to prepare for the possibility of forced landings at sea as well as on the Greenland Ice Cap. They would carry two complete radio sets, one waterproof and fitted into a rubber sailboat. This time they also compromised the plane’s performance by adding guns, a bug-proof tent, and extra food. The Sirius with full tanks would thus be so heavy as to demand both a good wind and a long runway of sheltered water to take off.

  Lindbergh met with Fred C. Meier of the Bureau of Plant Industry and Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture to discuss the practical aspects of Lindbergh’s newest invention. His “sky hook” was a piece of aluminum tubing that contained cartridges with petrolatum-smeared slides prepared to collect microorganisms from the atmosphere along the flight. The results of these experiments would prove valuable to scientists studying the movement of air currents in northern regions and even to physicians studying hay fever by tracking the aerial movement of pollen. He also packed a Leica camera with a fifty-millimeter lens to photograph prospective air bases. Once again, “the first couple of the sky,” as the press referred to the Lindberghs, brought positive publicity to aeronautics.

  Without fanfare, they began their expedition on July 9, 1933. Charles arrived at Glenn Curtiss Airport at eight o’clock that morning and spent much of the day putting his Sirius through its final tests. His presence quickly attracted the press and almost resulted in his crashing into a plane full of cameramen trying to get a closer shot of him.

  After a thunderstorm passed through, Anne arrived at the airport with the Harry Guggenheims and Aida Breckinridge. Around 3:30, the big ship slid down its ramp into the water. After forty-five seconds of splashing forward, the plane took off, heading northeast. “The Lindberghs have set no definite route nor have they picked definite landing places and stopover points,” wrote The New York Times. “Furthermore, they have set no time for their return. While the flight is being undertaken as a survey of what may some day be used as an air route to Europe for Pan-American Airway
s … the couple proposes to enjoy the trip without the worry of keeping to schedules.” The Jelling, a Danish steamer Pan American had hired to serve as one of several support ships, had left Philadelphia the week before and had already placed gasoline and landing buoys for the Lindberghs at Halifax and St. John’s. The boat would serve as their weather scout, primary radio contact, repair shop, and occasional hotel along their journey.

  The Lindberghs stopped in North Haven to say good-bye to their son and their respective mothers. More than ever, Anne was apprehensive about abandoning her baby, but never enough to pass up an opportunity to fly with her husband. And Charles was not about to let past travails curtail his future travels. On the afternoon of July eleventh, they left for Nova Scotia. Over the next eleven days, they surveyed Newfoundland. Anne’s diary recorded happy encounters with their hosts on board the support ships and on shore, while Charles’s dwelt on the topography.

  Over the next twenty-four days, the Lindberghs explored Greenland—Godthaab, Holsteinsborg, Ella Island, Eskimonaes, Angmagssalik, and Julianehaab. He fished and kayaked among the Greenlanders when the fog kept them from flying reconnaissance. They thrived in the island’s little towns set among the rocky hills, fjords, and “iceberghs” (as Anne began spelling it). They flew across the ice cap—“a huge continent of ice,” populated with prehistoric-looking musk ox and polar bears.

  “In those tiny, isolated outposts of the North,” Anne would later recollect, “the burden of fame fell from us and we achieved a measure of anonymity. We were strangers; we were guests; but we were not celebrities set apart from the human race.” While they felt they were blending into the daily life, they had no idea to what extent the press still monitored their movements.