17
“I first heard the term ‘double sunrise’ during World War II, when
I was on islands of the South Pacific…. While the sun is still below the
horizon, clouds color in both east and west. If you are not certain of
your directions, you sometimes have to look carefully to be sure
whether the sun is going to rise on your right hand or your left.”
—C.A.L. (in a letter) December 17, 1968
“JEALOUSY,” ANNE HAD ONCE WRITTEN IN HER DIARIES, “is the unlived life in you crying out to be spent.”
Four months after The Spirit of St. Louis took off, she confided to her private pages, “I envy C. his terrific drive though often I suffer the consequences of it. That terrific drive which he applies without discrimination to crossing the Atlantic, writing a book … or finding out the price of butter!”
Charles’s winning the Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1954 gnawed at her. She felt he deserved the award and that she should have joined him in his happiness. And yet, she confessed, “it inevitably caused me pain”—mostly because “I helped him write the book. I helped it to be that perfect. I know it never would have been that perfect without my help.”
Anne found even more painful the likening of her husband’s work to that of Saint-Exupéry. She could not bear to see her French idol diminished, not even by her husband. “The motivation of one was love, understanding, insight, compassion for human beings,” she wrote of the Frenchman. “The motivation of the other is conquest—success—achievement. Both the act itself and the writing about the act—was an act of conquest over the impossible. This is noble, this is courageous, heroic, exciting, also very beautiful, worthy of praise, fame—success. But it is not everything.”
And yet, Anne had to admit, Charles had written “HIS book”—“And this is His book no matter how much of me is in it—it is his book. He has put all of himself into it. Personality—emotions—thought—hours of work. He has written HIS book & I have never written mine. I know this.” For that she blamed only herself—“my cowardice—my inhibitions—my laziness—my lack of centeredness & sureness—my unhappiness & gropings—that have kept me from writing it.” After almost ten years of dabbling, Anne admitted to herself that she was not sure “her” book would ever be written. She was smarting too much to realize that most of it had, in fact, been put down on paper—in her diaries and letters and chapters she had abandoned over the years. She had only to stop struggling with the idea of writing it so that she could at last pull it all together.
Ever since Jim Newton had exposed the Lindberghs to Florida’s west coast, Anne made a point of getting there every year during the final weeks of winter, often alone. As early as March 1948, on the unspoiled island of Captiva, she had begun to let her mind wander, collecting imagery. Shells, especially, captured her attention, as she began to see how each variety was a different kind of dwelling and could symbolize a different phase of life. Staying in a shabby, rambling house of an inn, she wrote Charles that she felt like a hermit crab, leading an extremely simple life in this “deserted shell.” She said she also realized that the Florida beach “is not the place to work.”
That phrase would become the opening of her book, a group of essays she began to compose in 1950 in order to “think out” her own “particular pattern of living,” her own “individual balance of life, work and human relationships.” She was calling her collectionThe Shells, each piece composed of observations drawn from a different shell. As she tentatively shared the first pieces with intimate friends and family, she realized that these discussions she was having with herself on paper spoke to other women, “young and old, with different lives and experiences—those who supported themselves, those who wished careers, those who were hard-working housewives and mothers, and those with more ease.” Anne gradually discovered “that many women, and men, too, were grappling with essentially the same questions as I, and were hungry to discuss and argue and hammer out possible answers. Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me, to evolve another rhythm with more creatives pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.”
Anne got especially involved writing about a shell that had been given to her, that of a double-sunrise—a delicate bivalve, each side of which “is marked with the same pattern; translucent white, except for three rosy rays that fan out from the golden hinge binding the two together.” It made Anne think about relationships and how each half gets drawn apart into its more specialized and functional role. Considering all the angst she had endured in her own marriage, she wondered if the two increasingly disparate halves could ever be rejoined—“can the pure relationship of the sunrise shell be refound once it has become obscured?”
She got a chance to answer her own question in March 1951, during a marital rough patch, when Charles and Anne accepted an invitation together from John and Adelaide Marquand to visit them at their winter getaway, Treasure Island, four miles out to sea from Nassau. With a new war brewing in Korea, Marquand enticed Charles with the many advantages of the house they had rented: “There is no telephone,” he boasted, “and there is no radio, except one that belongs to the … help. There are no electric lights and no power gadgets. The rudimentary plumbing is supplied by rain water pumped by hand into the tanks. There are two good bathing beaches, and the reefs on the northern part of the island are excellent for spear fishing. We also have a boat with a motor, so we are not entirely out of touch from everything.” Also staying in the sprawling Great House on the private, narrow island would be Ellen Barry and Dr. Dana Atchley.
It was one of the most important weeks in Anne’s life, one which validated much of her recent work on The Shells. It also allowed Anne to observe her husband alongside her new physician friend and to draw comparisons. While Atchley had both a probing mind and a compassionate soul, Anne could not help agreeing with Charles that he was “the perfect example of the intellectual who has neglected the life of the body!” Meantime Anne watched Treasure Island bring out the boy in Charles, as he spent long sunny days in the water. “I have rarely seen C. as happy, as free—as released—as gay with people as this week,” Anne observed. At night, he held his own, talking science with Atchley and books with Marquand—even though the host did find “the Lone Eagle pretty tough to converse with as he does not understand the light approach to anything.” The Lindberghs took long walks together and sat alone under the stars; and seeing his “bronzed body in his tan shorts … on the brilliant white beach—with a long sword on his belt almost the length of his shorts—& a spear in his other hand”—reconnected her to the feelings for the shy golden boy with whom she had first fallen in love. Anne realized that relationships are in constant flux; but she could at last write with surety, “The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”
Anne’s week came to a perfect end during her final afternoon’s walk. Roaming out to the far beach, she turned over a piece of dried seaweed and uncovered an argonauta—a rare, transparent, feather-light mollusk shell. She had just used that very object as the symbol for the next stage of relationships in The Shells—that period after the double-sunrise and the oyster bed of home and children—when “Woman must come of age by herself.” Anne had recently tried to buy an argonauta but could not find one for sale. “And here,” she wrote in her diary, “was one given to me—at the moment I had ceased to look—or to want. Here was a gift from the sea—tossed up at my feet. Something I had never expected to find.”
The holiday glow did not linger. Back home, the Lindberghs promptly reverted to their roles of victim and critic, as she returned to the oyster bed and he to his life as an argonaut. Anne was further beset by her brother’s persistent struggle with mental illness—“a shattering problem,” Anne divulged to one of her adoring correspondents, “which continues & has absorbed so much of my time & my emotional capacity for the last two years. It has taken all the extra emotional reservoir left over from my children & my husband.” As much as anything, it kept Anne from completing her book. And then, Dwight Jr.’s severe condition unexpectedly solved many of Anne’s problems.
Morrow had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Believing he was a lighthouse having trouble beaming his light (or, other times, that he was all the saints rolled into one), he was sent to a closed hospital, where doctors believed his condition would only worsen. Although separated from her husband, Margot Morrow was determined to continue her search for someone who might aid in his recovery.
She heard about a controversial psychiatrist in Pennsylvania named Dr. John N. Rosen, who reputedly saved hopeless patients through radical treatments. Anne and her mother interviewed him and were greatly impressed. “It was really breath-taking,” Betty Morrow wrote of the meeting, “—his confidence—his unprofessionalism & his sympathy. We came out gasping—but convinced that here was someone whom we must have work w. Dwight.”
The maverick doctor insisted on Morrow’s being checked out of the hospital and set up in an apartment with a couple who would see that all his needs were met. Rosen said he would work with him every day for six weeks. The patient was far from cured after a month and a half of therapy, but after two years he stopped hallucinating. From then on he was able to reintegrate his mind, ultimately earning a Ph.D., securing a teaching position, and remarrying.
During this period, Rosen recognized Anne’s fragile mental state and suggested he treat her depressions as well. She cautiously agreed, reared like the rest of her clan to resist admitting to imperfection. But her unhappiness was undeniable, and she came to crave the appointments, which she attended every day of the summer of 1952. “I spent a year or two in therapy just crying,” she would later admit.
The sessions caused a series of “storms” at home all summer, arguments with Charles about everything from the way she undercooked the asparagus to her failure to complete her book. The unspoken subtext of his anger seemed to be her growing need for analysis. While Charles had long been sympathetic to his brother-in-law’s plight—“He put all his name and fame at my disposal,” recalled Margot Morrow of that period when she was desperately searching for somebody who could help Dwight—he failed to understand why Anne would want to discuss her most personal problems with a stranger. He suggested that it was a sign of weakness. Charles would never admit that he was afraid of what she might say about him or, worse, that he was losing control over her—that she might truly become, as her chapter on the argonauta suggested, a creature of her own free will, learning “how to stand alone.”
Anne began to welcome Charles’s absences, finding them a relief from his relentlessness. His departures were hard on her, because she found herself “a quiver of anxiety,” wondering if she would “be able to do it all without him—as he wants?” But the days his trips got canceled and he was stuck in Darien with his pent-up energy were harder. He would spend hours at a time fussing over legal matters, insurance policies, and finance. He compiled lists of “Things to Do,” which he divided into three categories—Current, Immediate, and Near Future. Those done, he might busy himself with household inventories or making lists of all the planes he had ever flown, places the house trailer had been, books he had read. Or he might refine the packing list for his trips, sorting and weighing each item until he had reduced his standard load to a mere twenty pounds—and that included a dark-blue dacron suit, shoe polish, medical supplies (carried in a sock), stationery, dictionary, maps, his disguise of a beret and eyeglasses, even emergency food.
There was always mail to catch up on, most of which he never read, responding only to envelopes from recognizable senders or those letters which his secretary deemed important. A few biographies of him were in the works, in which he took no part except in discouraging friends from speaking to any of the authors. On the other hand, he made himself available to authors writing about Robert Goddard, Dwight Morrow, his grandfather Dr. Land, Henry Ford, and the Isolationist movement. And he was always in the middle of a new book himself. Even stopping for a red light, his children observed, he would instinctively reach for a knife- sharpened pencil and the blue paper pads he ordered from Bristol-Streeter in New York to scribble fragments of his life.
His papers in order, he filled folders with pages of tasks for everybody in the house to perform, lists he would carry to meals and bark out to Anne and the children. It made everybody in the family uncomfortable, “as if the dentist were picking your mouth trying to find cavities,” Anne wrote. She began to grasp Dr. Rosen’s observation about “compulsive outward orderliness being a compensation for inward dis-orderliness.”
Lindbergh’s obsession with the Cold War distracted him from his internal strife, and trivial matters assumed grave importance. He sometimes got so worked up over the eventuality of a third World War that his mother-in-law thought he was “a madman!” Because he was away from home so often, he went so far as to prepare Anne to act alone in the event of a nuclear attack. Scott’s Cove was very safe, he said, but should war break out, Maine would be safer. New York should be avoided at all costs as it was “a key target, and vulnerable both by air and sea”; and dental appointments should be canceled, as there was the Soviet threat of sabotaging the water supply. When Anne said the kitchen needed a new stove, Charles told her to postpone the decision on this “important and complicated subject” until they could analyze the purchase “from personal, economic, and military standpoints.” Charles, Mrs. Morrow wrote in her diary, “needs a steady job.”
There was no want of offers, most of which he refused—everything from teaching at M.I.T. to General Wedemeyer’s recommending to President Eisenhower that Lindbergh serve as Secretary of Air. He did, however, maintain a series of positions on several boards, at which he worked indefatigably:
In April 1954, Lindbergh served on a commission created by Congress to select a permanent location for a United States Air Force Academy. The five members traveled eight thousand miles, inspecting twenty-one sites from the air and fifteen on the ground, before deciding on a location eight miles north of Colorado Springs. The selection prompted eighty-seven-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright to wire Lindbergh, “YOUR EYE FOR A SITE IS AS GOOD AS YOUR EYE FOR A FLIGHT.”
For six years, Lindbergh served on scientific committees whose mission was to develop ballistic missiles. Well into the fifties, America assigned low priorities to such programs, while the Russians saw their value, achieving what Lindbergh considered “extraordinary results with spatial missiles—the first satellite in orbit, the first missile to the moon, the first photograph of the moon’s back face.” Among the dozen other members of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Scientific Advisory Committee, a distressed Lindbergh became a vocal supporter of the development of long-range, nuclear-warhead ballistic missiles and an ardent spokesman for “the establishment and consistent support of a long-range space policy.” Meetings of these Air Force Management committees kept Lindbergh on the go—from discussions with senior Air Force officials at the Pentagon to talks with senior officials of aircraft companies, RAND Military Advisory Group, and the technological giant Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge in Southern California.
Turning to more mundane matters, Lindbergh filled stretches of unscheduled time with inspection tours on behalf of Pan American, trips almost entirely of his own devising. When he was not at office meetings in Manhattan on company business, Lindbergh inspected Pan Am flights and facilities around the world, taking several major trips a year. In 1953, he focused on the Caribbean; 1954, South America; 1956, the mid-East; 1959, South Africa. During three weeks in 1955, he flew from Port of Spain in the West Indies to Rome, via San Francisco, Tokyo, Bangkok, Rangoon, Karachi, and Istanbul. With each trip, Lindbergh became less concerned with the cockpit than the cabin—meal service, the size of the PAA flight bag, hot versus cold towels. Lindbergh admitted that he was not the best judge of first-class amenities, as he preferred sitting in the “tourist” section of the plane, the less elaborate service granting him more time to sleep. Lindbergh accepted but one dollar a year (plus expenses) from Pan Am for all his work, until Juan Trippe insisted on a $500-a-month retainer. By the end of the decade, Lindbergh’s time away from home increased.
For Anne, their marriage had become something of a sham. She wrote page after page about the “agonies of mind & emotions—spirit” and the “banked bitterness” she felt toward her husband for not being there for her. Fortunately, Dr. Atchley always was. “Dana pulled me through,” she wrote in her diary, “… kept me alive.” Trapped in his own difficult marriage, with a quarrelsome wife, the physician made time for Anne in his office after his scheduled appointments. Between visits, he dashed off short notes to her on prescription-size slips of yellow paper, which he folded in half and mailed in plain envelopes. He found her replies, on cerulean stationery, fortifying enough to call “blue vitamins.” By the end of 1953, he admitted that the most cheering thought during his dark hours that year had been the emergence of Anne waving “goodbye to [her] lifelong pal, guilt” and realizing her potential. Anne completed The Shells; and in the spring of 1954, when a letter from a publisher she had met five years earlier invited her to submit her manuscript, she did.
Kurt Wolff had been a publisher in Germany before he found much of his inventory being tossed into the Nazi bonfires of 1933. This half-Jewish bibliophile found refuge in France and Italy before emigrating to America in 1941. Within a year, he had started Pantheon Books, which began in his Washington Square apartment. Pantheon quickly distinguished itself not only as the translators and publishers of André Gide, Paul Valéry, and C. G. Jung, but also as the creators of physically beautiful books, featuring the work of such artists as Alexander Calder, Ben Shahn, and Marc Chagall. Publishing “world literature” in the American marketplace had kept Pantheon a small and financially modest house; and Anne felt the courtly Wolff—a friend of her favorite author, Rainer Maria Rilke—would be a sympathetic reader, the first publisher to whom she would expose her fifteen-thousand-word manuscript.
The day after reading it, Wolff wrote the author, “I need not tell you that it is a lovely and touching book—written with that scrupulous care and workmanship which distinguishes you … I think you have made the case of women in this country, in our times, poignantly clear.” With few suggestions to offer, he said, “if you see any way of confiding this book to us, we would try to translate it into a printed shape appropriate to its contents. I would be both proud and happy to have this privilege. But I will bring no pressure to bear on a conscience as delicate as yours.” He did not have to.
By fall, Anne was correcting galleys of her retitled book, announced in Pantheon’s Spring 1955 catalogue as Gift from the Sea. Anne’s expectations for so personal and slender a book—not even one hundred undersized pages of text—were naturally low. She was resigned to its quiet publication in the shadow of Charles’s persisting success with The Spirit of St. Louis.
Gift from the Sea blossomed into one of the most phenomenal triumphs in publishing history. It sold six hundred thousand copies in hardback, ranking number one on the bestseller list for a year; paperback sales exceeded two million copies. Pantheon enjoyed its first great financial windfall, paving the way for such future bestselling authors as Pasternak, Lampedusa, and Günter Grass. But it was this small American book that put the internationally celebrated publishing house on the map, continually requiring new editions and translations, continuing to make “religious” bestseller lists forty years after its publication.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book spoke to a century of women. It bridged the “victories” attained by feminists of her mother’s generation with those of the Women’s Liberationists of her daughters’ generation. “Perhaps the great progress, humanly speaking, in these past twenty years, for both women and men, is in the growth of consciousness,” she would observe on the book’s twentieth anniversary. That, she believed, was largely the result of men and women talking to each other, “openly and honestly, often arguing and challenging, but at least trying to explain what they felt could never be explained.” For the generation of postwar housewives and mothers—whom she called “the great vacationless class”—Gift from the Sea opened that dialogue.
Sadly, the two foremost feminists in Anne’s life did not live to see the publication of her book. On September 7, 1954, after years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh died at the age of seventy-eight. Unhappy in her youth and in her marriage, she had struck out on her own as a teacher in the wilds of Minnesota, and later in the Detroit school system, never allowing herself to be trapped. And yet Anne puzzled for a long time over her years of peculiar behavior, realizing decades later that Evangeline had been, no doubt, chemically imbalanced. Anne and Charles met in Detroit for her simple funeral service in the old country church on Orchard Lake, where Evangeline’s grandfather Lodge used to preach and where she and “Brother” worshipped as children. She was buried in Pine Lake Cemetery, amongst her kin. Charles never delved into the sources of his mother’s troubles, for it would have meant prying into his parents’ marriage—a Pandora’s box he chose never to open.
Three months later, Anne’s mother suffered a stroke, which took her speech and left her partially paralyzed. A few weeks after that, she suffered a second stroke and her condition deteriorated. After a life of service—to family, schools, community, and church—Elizabeth Cutter Morrow died at the age of eighty-one.
While Charles took enormous pride in the success of his wife’s book, he was not present to witness it. He traveled more that year than any in his life—eleven times across the Atlantic and once across the Pacific, in addition to various trips within the Americas. His repeated abandonments made Anne question her own book’s sincerity. “There is a terrible irony in it with Gift from the Sea heading the best-sellers week after week, preaching ‘Solitude—Solitude!’ she wrote in her diary. “Here I am, having just what I say I want & it does not seem to be the answer! Then is the book all ‘hooey’ as I sometimes feel? I don’t think so, but the truth of it is not relevant to me at this moment in my life.”
Having become the nation’s most popular author emboldened Anne to publish the book she had dreamed of since childhood, a collection of her poetry. Pantheon released The Unicorn and Other Poems: 1935–1955, thirty-five selections, in September 1956. Most of the poems bespoke the artist’s loneliness—images of barren trees, bolted doors, abandoned roads, broken shells. The book’s final poem concluded with a couplet that revealed something of what her marriage had both cost her and provided her:
Blow through me, Life, pared down at last to bone,
So fragile and so fearless have I grown!
Anne’s book was published to prominent reviews of considerable acclaim. Volumes of poetry seldom sold more than a few thousand copies; but Pantheon had printed twenty-five thousand copies before its September publication, and another forty thousand for the Christmas rush. It was not until January 1957 that anybody took serious issue with the book; and the result was a literary flap the likes of which had hardly been seen since The Wave of the Future.
Poet John Ciardi, poetry editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, came out of his corner swinging. “As a reviewer not of Mrs. Lindbergh but of her poems,” he wrote, “I have, in duty, nothing but contempt to offer. I am compelled to believe that Mrs. Lindbergh has written an offensively bad book—inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept any shirk as a true high-C. If there is judgment it must go by standards. I cannot apologize for this judgment.” He proceeded to lacerate her poems, practically line by line. Nobody had ever treated Anne Lindbergh that way. Even in the hysteria over The Wave of the Future, reviewers had gone out of their way to be polite.
The response from the Saturday Review’s readership was overwhelming. On February ninth, the magazine published a small sample of the hundreds of irate letters its editors had received, with demands for Ciardi to apologize if not resign. The debate grew into what the magazine’s founding editor, Norman Cousins, would later call “the biggest storm of reader protest in the thirty-three-year history of the Saturday Review.” It swept into classrooms, cocktail parties, libraries, even onto the pages of other periodicals. Cousins himself felt compelled to take his critic to task, chiding him for applying the word “illiterate” to Mrs. Lindbergh or her books. “There are few living authors who are using the English language more sensitively or with more genuine appeal,” he wrote. “There is in her books a respect for human responses to beauty and for the great connections between humankind and nature that gives her work rare distinction and that earns her the gratitude and loyalty of her readers, as the present episode makes clear.” But he would take no action against Ciardi, standing instead by the independence of his reviewers’ opinions.
In a subsequent essay, “The Reviewer’s Duty to Damn: A Letter to an Avalanche,” Ciardi explained that he had not written in anger. He simply felt that The Unicorn “was about to be taken seriously as poetry, whereas my conviction was that it had not taken itself seriously … as poetry.” Anne maintained public silence, letting her fans speak for her. She wrote one of them that she did not think much of the poems herself, and she thought they were “not worth his attack.” She was hurt not so much by what Ciardi said as “by his intention to hurt—to tear down, to destroy.” She believed he was actually attacking “the false overly sweet image of me in the public mind—a kind of ‘Whistler’s Mother,’ complete with lace cap—rocking chair—folded hands & smile of acceptance.” Anne hated that picture too. But, she had to accept, “the American public seem to like it & defend it to the teeth. Unfortunately he did not destroy it—only shellaced me more tightly in the frame.” Except for one verse in the following December’s Atlantic Monthly, Anne Morrow Lindbergh never published another poem.
While this latest encounter with fame sent Anne scuttling back to the privacy of her home and diaries, Charles found himself the object of attention all over again, in CinemaScope no less. After several years in development, the motion-picture version of The Spirit of St. Louis was released.
A Jewish émigré known for the sophistication, and often cynicism, of his films, Billy Wilder seemed an unlikely candidate to translate the innocent story of a Minnesota farmboy’s flight to Paris. But even though the writer-director had difficulty understanding Lindbergh’s earlier isolationism and his accepting a medal from the very country Wilder had fled, the “Lone Eagle” had remained one of his heroes since 1927. If nothing else, making a film whose primary action consisted of a man sitting alone in a cockpit for thirty-three hours presented a creative challenge. Impressed with the seriousness of Wilder’s work as a filmmaker, Lindbergh had sold the rights to him and his producing partner, Leland Hayward, for $200,000 plus ten percent of the gross from the first dollar of receipts. In Hollywood hyperbole, the press announced that Lindbergh had sold the rights for a million dollars.
During the months he worked on the screenplay, Wilder frequently sent his subject letters full of questions, the specificity of which only reassured him that Wilder intended to produce as accurate a reenactment as possible. With that in mind, Lindbergh convinced Hayward and Wilder to hire his old barnstorming friend Bud Gurney, then flying DC-6’s for United, to serve as the film’s technical adviser. Gurney got to take a lucrative leave from his commercial flying, and Lindbergh had his oldest friend shepherding the filmmakers if ever they strayed too far from the truth.
Knowing Wilder’s need for details, Lindbergh agreed to accompany him on a specially arranged visit to the Spirit of St. Louis at the Smithsonian. They flew together on a commercial flight, during which they encountered terrible turbulence. In their prior meetings, the generally voluble Wilder found Lindbergh so cold and dry that he restrained himself from dropping his fabled one-liners. But with the plane shaking so badly, he could not refrain from leaning over and saying, “Mr. Lindbergh, would it not be embarrassing if we crashed and the headlines said, ‘Lone Eagle and Jewish Friend in Plane Crash’?”
Leland Hayward and his wife (like Lindbergh, known to her friends as “Slim”) joined them at the Smithsonian, where the museum had erected scaffolding, with a stairway up to a platform right alongside the Spirit. It was an eye-opening visit for the filmmakers to see how crude the plane was—with an instrument panel, Slim Hayward noticed, “about as complicated as the dashboard of a Model T Ford.” She got a peek at Lindbergh’s character when he stepped into the plane and noticed the engine fuel primer knob was pulled out. “This is not supposed to be in this position, it should be thrust in,” he muttered, as he gently pushed it.
Back in California, adviser Gurney wrote Lindbergh that he had become most concerned as to whom should be cast in the lead. “I haven’t the remotest idea who should,” he confessed, “but I feel most strongly that whoever he is—he should be able to reflect to some extent, the way you impressed those who knew you at that time.” Gurney did not just mean tall and lanky but also decent and modest. Because it was the only role of any importance in the entire picture, it warranted a movie star. Closest to fulfilling all those qualifications was James Stewart, a decorated pilot and lifelong admirer of Lindbergh, who lobbied for the role. For all his qualities, however, casting Stewart forced the filmmakers to sacrifice one of the essential elements of the Lindbergh story—for no matter how effectively Hollywood’s makeup men worked their magic, nobody could disguise the fact that the twenty-five-year-old “Lone Eagle” was being portrayed by a forty-seven-year-old.
The film’s only other serious deviation from the truth was a dramatic device of Wilder’s. Before he had met Lindbergh, Wilder had toyed with the idea of showing Lindbergh spending the night before his flight, as had been falsely rumored in 1927, with a waitress of easy virtue. It would provide the story with a love interest, thus allowing the audience to follow another character anticipating his return and giving Lindbergh someone to whom he could soliloquize during the flight. Realizing how untrue to character such an addition would be, Wilder dropped the idea. Still facing the problem of dramatizing a man alone in a plane, he decided to break the monotony as Lindbergh had in his book, by flashing back to earlier events in Lindbergh’s life which led to his flight. The rest, he decided, could be helped by a fly—an insect that stows away and buzzes around Lindbergh’s sandwiches—to which Lindbergh could speak during his journey.
Wilder insisted the fly was dramatically necessary to carry Lindbergh from New York to Paris. But once filming began, Stewart found its falseness so irritating that he said either the fly left the picture or he did. Hayward said it was too expensive to reshoot the scenes already “in the can,” and so they struck a compromise: the fly could travel as far as Newfoundland. The rest of the shoot was fairly typical, plagued with bad weather and cost overruns. Building three replicas of Lindbergh’s plane and capturing the aerial footage that comprises much of the film amounted to more than $1,000,000 of the picture’s $6,000,000 budget.
Although nobody involved was fully satisfied with the finished product, Warner Brothers pulled out all the stops in promoting the film. The studio threw a gala premiere at the Hollywood Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on April 11, 1957, and they released it across the country throughout the spring, hoping to capitalize on publicity for the thirtieth anniversary of the flight. In its extensive advertising and promotion, the studio struck a deal with Kellogg’s, which agreed to pack a three-inch replica of the Spirit into each of twenty million boxes of Rice Krispies. Standard Oil, Wright Aeronautical, Goodrich, Pioneer Instruments, and several other companies boosted the film with their own “tie-in” advertising.
Most of it proved to be for naught. Jack Warner was reputed to have called The Spirit of St. Louis the “most disastrous failure” his studio ever had, and he could not figure out why. Much of the problem seemed to be that the phenomenon of Lindbergh had subsided. Beside the many who had grown indifferent or hostile toward him, baby-boomers were more interested in rocket ships and outer space than in some antique plane. Despite several striking vignettes, especially those capturing the moments before takeoff, the contained action of the drama could not offer the kind of widescreen thrills—or even an antagonist—that movie audiences had come to expect.
And there was, it turned out, difficulty getting the film booked into several theaters because of Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic reputation. In fact, shortly before it was released, a Warner Brothers attorney contacted Lindbergh’s lawyer and suggested that the general don his Air Force uniform, fly to Israel, and officially review their troops. Lindbergh, of course, refrained from participating in any of the film’s promotion, including his appearance at the opening. He ignored the requests for him to speak at banquets, to grandmarshal parades, to reminisce on the radio, or to appear on television game shows.
Trying to attract as little attention as possible, he and Anne and their three youngest children quietly slipped into Radio City one afternoon that March to see the film. Despite the few deviations from the truth for dramatic or comic effect, Lindbergh found it true to the spirit of his journey. The audience surrounding him that day was enthralled. And about halfway through the film, during one particularly tense moment in the flight, eleven-year-old Reeve clutched her mother’s arm and whispered, “He is going to get there, isn’t he?”
While their father’s monumental flight was occasionally discussed at home, the equally famous subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping was strictly taboo. It pervaded the air they all breathed, but it was never remarked upon … until that day when each Lindbergh child would come home from school confused for having learned about a brother who was never discussed. “Father,” Ansy later related of her conversation, “took me aside, told me the story in just enough words to satisfy my curiosity, and never discussed it again. He made it very clear, however, that ‘they caught the right man.’”
Every few years, the unmentionable topic surfaced within the family, as a young man claiming to be the long-lost “Lindbergh Baby” would write or simply appear in Scott’s Cove. The letters went unanswered; the impromptu visitors were not permitted entry into the house. Charles would quietly walk the pretenders back to their cars, the children not knowing exactly what he said as he sent them on their way. With such insanity always lingering just around the corner, the Lindbergh children were raised knowing more than not to talk to strangers. From the time they were old enough to travel alone, they were trained in the ways of traveling incognito—using assumed names, disclosing their itineraries only to those who had to know, never drawing attention to themselves. More than sixty years after the crime, the Lindbergh family continued to receive communiqués from “the Baby.”
The five surviving Lindbergh children grew up practical but naïve, generous but cautious, industrious but self-critical. Each was nurtured to be uncommonly kind and polite; and each developed, by nature, a strong sense of privacy. They all inherited their mother’s sensitivity and their father’s vitality; the boys were quietly virile, the girls vigorously feminine. Growing up in a home with much love but little affection, the Lindbergh children saw a marriage so strong that it often excluded them. They were all encouraged at early ages to get on with their own lives, to leave the nest. Eager to achieve, they instinctively entered arenas that interested their father but in which they would not have to compete against him or his memory.
Coming of age in the Lindbergh family meant subjection to a barrage of letters from the paterfamilias, lectures on everything from finance and sexuality to career and press relations. Although Jon left for Stanford University a skilled pilot, his passion since his youth at Illiec was the sea. Charles removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders by telling him, “I don’t believe I’d take up aviation as a career. Many of the elements which attracted me to flying no longer exist. Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art. The air was as full of adventure and the unknown as North America was a hundred years after Columbus…. I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.” In addition to his studies, Jon pursued mountain-climbing and skydiving, and joined the Naval Reserve. He seriously considered leaving Stanford after his second year, as his father had at Wisconsin; but Lindbergh reminded his son that his grades at Wisconsin had not left him any choice.
Jon remained at Stanford but moved out of his dormitory and into a tent he pitched in the Coast Range foothills a few miles from campus. After completing his degree in Biology, he did postgraduate work at the University of California at La Jolla and spent three years as a “frogman”—an Ensign with the U. S. Navy Underwater Demolition Teams who worked with explosive charges. Three months before graduating, he married a schoolmate, Barbara Robbins, the daughter of a Chicago mining engineer. Charles and Anne were thrilled with his choice and even more elated the following year when they became grandparents.
Shortly before the birth, Lindbergh offered an unsolicited opinion, that should the newborn be a boy it not be named Charles. “As you know,” he wrote, “your older brother was named Charles, Jr. The naming of your first boy ‘Charles’ would, without doubt, create undesirable and dangerous newspaper publicity connecting him with the tragedy of 1932—which was probably itself caused by excessive publicity.” The advice was not necessary. The young Lindberghs named the girl Christine. She was less than a month old before Charles had sent Jon a letter about setting up trust funds for his children.
Land followed Jon to Stanford and spent his summers working on ranches—jobs his father arranged—one in British Columbia, another in Liberia. A hard worker, he always declined invitations for special sleeping and eating privileges so that he could bunk and chow down with the cowboys and farmhands. By the time he graduated, he had decided to turn his passion into a profession. When he and Jon announced that they wanted to become partners in a ranch, which Land would run, their father supported it wholeheartedly. Lindbergh knew the attractions of that life but warned his two eldest sons, “You both have deep, reasoning, and penetrating minds that will probably become restless if you try to keep them inside the barbed wire of a cow pasture, even a big cow pasture.” After debating both sides of the issue in a long letter—and asking the boys to consider a location far from a “major fallout area” in the event of an atomic war—Lindbergh asked to participate in the venture as well.
Growing up in less solitude than the elder siblings, the three youngest Lindbergh children paid a price for being celebrities’ children. Young Anne was most sensitive to the problems of having a famous father, that feeling of being “different.” A captivating, petite blonde, Ansy maintained an air of modesty, even as she excelled in her studies, athletics, and music, playing both flute and piano; but she often felt all eyes were on her because she was a Lindbergh. “I wish I were the daughter of a shoemaker!” she angrily said to her father one day, explaining that a reporter from McCall’s was writing up a dinner her Latin class was giving, only because the first Lindbergh daughter was part of the event.
Worse for her than her father’s apparent omnipresence was his repeated absence. Years later, Ansy reread diaries she had kept in the 1950s and was astonished at how little there was about him, even though, she later noted, “I remember clearly that I never stopped thinking about him.” For two of those years, she used to write letters to an imaginary friend named Carolyn, the salutations of which she shortened to “Dear Cal.” It did not occur to her until many years later that she was actually writing to Charles A. Lindbergh—C.A.L. In 1958, she left for Radcliffe.
Scott Lindbergh was the most complicated of the Lindbergh children, the most sensitive of the boys. The stories he used to write as a child were invariably full of magic and exotic backgrounds; at the same time, he was always intrigued by practical problems. With great admiration, Charles wrote of him to Anne, “I have never known anyone, adult or child, with his ability to pull up out of what seem hopeless depths—he starts right in at times I would have said, ‘To Hell with it, there’s another morning coming tomorrow, and I’m going to get a night’s sleep’—and he usually ends up successfully.” And yet there was a growing restlessness within Scott, spurts of quiet defiance that Charles felt he had to squelch. He came down hardest on him.
Anne took up his cause. For one of the first times, she stood up to Charles, insisting that it was detrimental to denigrate Scott so relentlessly. “Did your Father … treat you like this?” she asked rhetorically, not knowing that C.A. had been worse. Anne insisted that “Scott needs support & not knocking down all the time.” Charles countered that “Scott must learn to think—not to be careless…. His life may depend on it,” especially in this dangerous new age. “Machinery,” he said, “doesn’t forgive.”
“Neither,” Anne snapped back, “does the unconscious.” In great anger she asked, “What do you think it does to a person to have everything he does called wrong?” In Scott’s case, it became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he was always losing wallets and articles of clothing, showing up late, procrastinating. He felt he was not popular at school, that he was considered a “card,” yet another reputation he had to live up to.
The youngest child, Reeve, fought a losing battle all her life. With big blue eyes and blonde ringlets, hyperarticulate from the moment she could speak, her primary task seemed to be in corraling her straying family members. As a toddler, she once told her mother, “When you … find Father, you tell him he must come back sometime.” Her attitude hardly changed over the years.
Lindbergh related better to his children as they became adults, finding them more interesting as they grew more independent. Such was not always the case with his wife. The new social life Anne was creating for herself hardly engaged him. It seemed stuffy, full of overly refined friends with little practical experience in the world, people prone to analyzing the subtext of everything and talking endlessly about “relationships.” “You have so many orchids in your life,” he once complained to her. “You should collect a few cabbages.”
Anne did not disagree. She was aware that she found solace playing analyst and nursemaid to a lot of effusive women. She also found herself, for the first time, opening up to men. Several of her repressed gentlemen friends found this sudden emotional availability like catnip. The husband of one of Anne’s best friends launched into his own private correspondence with her, pouring out his heart; and Corliss Lamont, who had been carrying the torch for Anne since childhood, resurfaced in her life, professing his undying love for her. Failing to see his wife’s need for admirers, Charles had little use for these people who, he felt, were wasting Anne’s time with their problems. He called them “lame ducks.”
Lindbergh even lumped Dr. Atchley into that category. And so he paid no attention to the regular exchange of Atchley’s little yellow notes for Anne’s “blue vitamins.” He did not know they spoke almost every morning, quietly ministering to each other’s loneliness. On top of her frequent visits to his office, they began to appear in public together, at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Katharine Hepburn, a friend and patient of Dr. Atchley, occasionally saw them on the town together. “But, of course,” she presumed, “they were both too respectable to do anything about their feelings.” Miss Hepburn was wrong.
Englewood society buzzed that Atchley’s marriage had soured because his wife had taken to mistreating him in public in retaliation for a secret affair in which he was engaged. “Nobody ever knew with whom,” corroborated writer James Lord, who had been raised in the New Jersey town. While the doctor’s Manhattan waiting room had become a harem of admirers—including such desirable women as Hepburn, Garbo, and Nancy “Slim” Hayward—Dr. Atchley had fallen in love with Anne Lindbergh.
The friendship of these two longing souls blossomed into a love affair in 1956 and continued for the next few years. “I wish I could take a nice long walk in the dry cold air and come back to a warm fire and a martini (or two), and then talk, talk, talk,” he wrote in one of his missives at the peak of their relationship. “I am so full of people in trouble … and your wit, warmth and wisdom would solve everything.” Most of his notes during this period were discreet effusions about how much he craved her company and was frustrated when they were apart. “I found myself urging you not to be late tomorrow,” he wrote her in March 1956. “I am going to join A. A. (only the A. isn’t for alcoholics).”
Anne divulged her adultery only to her sister and a handful of other confidantes. Her daughter Ansy stumbled across it one day shortly before starting Radcliffe and always wondered whether her discovery had been accidental. She noticed an unopened letter on a table addressed to “Anne Lindbergh” and assumed that she was the addressee. “I was in the middle of reading what was obviously a love letter,” she later recounted, “when Mother came in and said, ‘I believe that’s mine.’” Only afterward did her unembarrassed mother comment, “You should not have seen that.”
Many years later, Reeve Lindbergh would comment on the difficulty it must have been for Ansy to grow up in her mother’s shadow while carrying the same name. It was perhaps more difficult for their mother, going through menopause, to see her beautiful and brilliant young daughter come of age. “I always felt,” Ansy recalled, “that it was important to Mother that I know about her affair with Dr. Atchley. My sense,” Ansy said, “is that Father never knew … or, rather, never chose to know. He knew that Mother loved him and would never leave him. And that was all he needed to know.”
In the heat of the relationship, during the summer of 1956, Anne lost her wedding ring; and the Freudian implications were not lost on her. “There are no accidents in Psychiatry,” she wrote her sister Constance.
A few months later Anne rented an apartment in New York City, two small rooms at 146 East Nineteenth Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place. She was abandoning neither her house nor her family in Connecticut; it simply provided her “the new frame for seeing people & a place to escape to for a night.” Dr. Atchley became a frequent visitor, for quiet dinners and martinis as well as the occasional breakfast they might host for their most intimate friends. The notes that continued to pass between them suggest deep, fulfilling love, what Atchley wrote was “one outstanding reason why I am glad I was born … a wonderful thing to happen to a human being—and so few are so lucky.” After they saw the motion-picture version of The King and I together, Atchley found himself humming the song “Hello Young Lovers,” a wistful recollection of one in middle age recounting, “All of my memories are happy tonight, for I’ve had a love of my own.” The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical moved Anne as well and seemed to play a role in her making a decision about her domestic situation.
By late 1958, Anne’s life was considerably brighter than it had been at the start of the decade. She was even back at work, trying her hand at fiction again. Only her marriage remained problematic, and to a few friends, such as Alan and Lucia Valentine, she raised the option of divorce. But another ballad from The King and I kept playing in her ear, a song in which Lady Thiang, the mother of the King’s oldest son, describes Anna Leonowens’s feelings for the self-contained King of Siam.
The thoughtless things he’ll do
Will hurt and worry you
Then, all at once, he’ll do
Something wonderful.
You’ll always go along,
Defend him when he’s wrong
And tell him when he’s strong,
He is wonderful.
He’ll always need your love
And so he’ll get your love
A man who needs your love
Can be wonderful.
Anne recommitted herself to her husband. It was not the song, of course, that changed her thinking. It was more, as her daughter Reeve commented on Anne’s general behavior, that “Mother enjoyed wearing her hairshirt—finding pleasure in the misery of situations.” Although her marriage continued to cause her considerable pain and unrest—literally, headaches, indigestion, and sleeplessness—she wrote her sister, “I must accept the fact that my husband is as completely different from me as he can be—gets his stimulus differently, his contacts with people differently, his refreshment differently.” She realized that in some ways they were “badly mated.” But looking back on thirty years of marriage, she realized not only that she did not want it to end but also that she evidently had the kind of marriage she wanted. She tamped her affair with Dana Atchley down to a warm friendship.
“There were two suns in our solar system,” Reeve once remarked of the experience of growing up Lindbergh. From the end of 1958 forward, as often as not, those two suns would rise on any given day over two separate continents.