8
“A girl should come from a healthy family, of course.
My experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me
the importance of good heredity.”
—C.A.L.
DWIGHT WHITNEY MORROW WAS THE AMERICAN DREAM incarnate, living proof that hard work could elevate the most humbly born to the nation’s power elite. He was often presumed to be descended from one of America’s first families, but the life of this influential banker-diplomat-politician—whom Walter Lippmann called the most “trusted” man of his time—actually began in poverty in West Virginia.
In 1873, he was literally born into a world of education—in the building that was Marshall College. His father, James—a teacher’s son—had recently been named president of the college, a position whose perquisite of free lodging for him and his growing family was worth more than the meager salary. Shortly thereafter, the James Morrows moved to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where he assumed a number of teaching jobs over the years, Mathematics and the Bible his favorite subjects. This father of eight never earned more than $1,800 a year.
Although Dwight never grew as tall as five and one-half feet, and was plagued by chronic migraine headaches, poor digestion, and a slightly misshaped arm, no obstacle ever seemed insurmountable to him. He dreamed of following his older brother to West Point and scored highest in his district on the entrance examination. Shortly after being notified that he would receive the appointment, he discovered that he was being passed over in favor of the young man who had placed second—the result of political pull.
Disillusioned but undeterred, Dwight Morrow wrote to the man who had the final word on appointments to West Point. Just weeks before his eighteenth birthday, he sent a handwritten letter to President Benjamin Harrison himself, reminding him of his special power to appoint ten cadets himself every four years. “A dissapointment [sic] of the kind I received may not seem very much to a man in your position,” he wrote the Commander in Chief; “but if you were ever a poor boy, with a poor boy’s ambitions you can appreciate my position.” Morrow received no satisfaction, not even a personal reply; but the episode proved to be a turning point in his life. Deprived of the opportunities West Point might have afforded him, he grew determined to turn his adversity to greater advantage, to become a man of influence himself. A former teacher in Pittsburgh who knew the Morrows informed Dwight that it was not too late to apply for the next term at his alma mater.
Amherst College became Morrow’s lifelong passion. As an undergraduate, he scraped by financially, borrowing money and tutoring; but he was quickly recognized as the most dynamic member of the class of 1895—an A-student, a prizewinner in Mathematics, Writing, and Forensics, as well as the class orator at graduation. He wrote for the campus literary magazines, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and made many friends. Upon graduation, Amherst legend has held for more than a century, Dwight Morrow was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by a unanimous vote save one—his, which he cast for classmate Calvin Coolidge.
Amherst not only opened up the world intellectually for Morrow, but also romantically. In the spring of his sophomore year, the diminutive young man with the Roman nose and determined gaze attended a dance at which he met a freshman from Smith College, across the Connecticut River in Northampton. Elizabeth Reeve Cutter, from Cleveland, was possibly the only coed in Massachusetts whose zeal for college matched his. Outstanding in both scholastics and extracurricular activities, Elizabeth—Betty to most, Bee to a few, and ultimately Betsey to young Mr. Morrow—was racking up as many honors and prizes at Smith as he had at Amherst.
She was no taller than he, with thick eyebrows, high cheekbones, and almost porcelain skin, which made her look like an Eskimo doll. No beauty—which did not matter to Morrow—she was all personality—which did. They quickly realized they were kindred spirits—hardworking, energetic young people at prestigious colleges, with a lot to prove. Although her family’s financial circumstances were hardly as dire as that of the Morrows, Elizabeth’s drive to succeed was at least as powerful as Dwight’s. Since childhood, she had been fueled by a circumstance she seldom mentioned. At the age of nine, her twin sister, Mary, suffered a long illness and died. The result was that Betty charged through life— “determined to accomplish,” observed one of her relatives, “enough for two.”
Miss Cutter and Mr. Morrow’s affections for each other grew slowly, in accordance with the innocence of the times and the seriousness of their natures. Before they spoke of marriage, he had graduated from Columbia Law School and secured a position at the young but illustrious New York law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett; and she had taught at a private school in Cleveland, studied at the Sorbonne and in Florence, and had several poems published in national magazines. In June 1903—after his salary was raised to $3,000—they wed, honeymooning in the hills of New England, where they visited their respective alma maters.
With abilities equaling their ambitions, the Morrows were always looking ahead. He proved to be an unqualified success at his law firm, putting work before pleasure and often losing himself in thought. Both Morrows preferred the “generous backyard life” of the suburbs to the social pressures of New York City; and directly across the Hudson River from the northernmost tip of Manhattan Island, they discovered the newly incorporated city of Englewood, perched on the Palisades. By commuter train to Jersey City and through the “Hudson Tube,” or by ferry down the river, one could commute to lower Manhattan in less than an hour. Already Englewood was becoming known for its fine schools and free library; and the general practitioner made housecalls in his two-seated buggy. The town was attracting a number of bankers, among them Henry P. Davison and Thomas Lamont, power-players at J. P. Morgan & Company.
On their first visit to Englewood, the Morrows learned of a new house for rent on Spring Lane, an easy walk to the town center and the Presbyterian Church. The rent was more than they had budgeted, and the three-story house—with unexpected gables and small windows in odd places—contained more rooms than they needed; but they opted to bank on the future. One night in what they called “the little brown house,” Morrow awoke from what he considered “the most horrible” nightmare, in which he had dreamed that they had become “enormously rich.”
Within a few years his income had increased tenfold, and children filled the house. Elisabeth Reeve was born in 1904; Anne Spencer two years later, and Dwight Jr. two years after that. In 1909, the Morrows moved into a larger house of “late gingerbread architecture” on an acre of land on Palisade Avenue, then still a country road. It was a sprawling place, full of trees, with a bedroom for each child. A third daughter, Constance, was born in 1913. “If we keep to our present resolutions and ill fortune does not overtake us,” Morrow wrote at the time, “we shall live here for the rest of our lives.”
Morrow flourished in corporate law and became a partner at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett in short order. With his growing list of civic boards and local charities, he found it increasingly difficult to spend time at home. “This, Betsey, is not the life for you or me,” he told his wife. “Once we have made $100,000 we shall retire from the practice of the law. I shall teach history: you will write poetry: the children will earn their own living.”
That dream never came true, but his nightmare did. At the end of 1913, Thomas Lamont approached his neighbor to offer him a partnership at J. P. Morgan & Company. Although unexpected, the timing was right for both Morrow and Morgan. He was looking for a new challenge; and the fifty-two-year-old banking empire—at its zenith in power and its nadir in reputation—provided the opportunity. It was, in fact, the very moment when Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh of Minnesota had called for a Congressional probe of Wall Street’s concentration of power, the Money Trust. With the sudden death of J. Pierpont Morgan, the firm sought a new senior partner. They selected Morrow—“not merely because of his talent, for talent was plentiful and easy to buy,” Calvin Coolidge would later explain, “but … for his character, which was priceless.”
Morrow wrestled with the fantastic offer for a month. After three weeks of pounding headaches, he saw a political cartoon in a newspaper in which J. P. Morgan was portrayed as a vulture feeding on the entrails of the shareholders of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The bank had for the past decade been actively involved in the monopolistic operation of the transportation giant of the northeast; but that involvement had also created a company that greatly improved the public’s transportation needs and turned it into a sound investment. The unfairness of the cartoon clinched Morrow’s decision. He and his wife stayed up until two o’clock in the morning drafting his resignation letter to his present employers. “We is bankers after we mail this letter,” Dwight said to Betsey, filling his pipe. “Well,” she replied, “I hope we’ll be as happy as we’ve been as lawyers.”
Morrow had suddenly reached the highest echelons of international finance, bringing with him the luster of integrity. Upon entering his new offices at 23 Wall Street, he also became a partner in Drexel & Co. in Philadelphia, Morgan, Grenfell & Co. in London, and Morgan, Harjes & Co. in Paris. Morrow was soon dealing with the heads of General Motors and Du Pont; he helped save the credit of the City of New York; he conferred with the Secretary of the Treasury about financing the War; he worked with Jean Monnet reconstructing postwar Europe.
Domestic changes accompanied the professional challenges. While Dwight and Betty maintained a semblance of modesty in their standard of living in Englewood, his new position forced them to pay more attention to appearances. The Morrows continued to remain active in local affairs, but the demands for their participation on boards of national organizations, chairing school committees, and heading fund drives steadily increased. His work required their taking an apartment in New York City; and though they clung to the image of living in Englewood, the eleventh floor of the new building at 4 East Sixty-sixth Street became the address at which they gradually found themselves residing. Morrow became one of the owners of the fashionable building.
Living in Manhattan, the Morrows began summering on the island of North Haven, in Penobscot Bay, Maine, and winter-vacationing in Nassau. Morrow’s new job involved frequent travel to Europe. Whenever possible, he took his children along for the educational benefits, reading appropriate passages from Henry James as they stopped in England and France. Dining with Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, professors and judges, ambassadors and generals, presidents and prime ministers, no doors were closed to the Dwight Morrows.
Everything they touched turned into success. To their children, their marriage seemed ideal while their own lives were enormously privileged. In her early years of motherhood, Betty Morrow dropped everything at five o’clock, so that she could read to her youngsters. In time, they used this children’s hour to read by themselves and to write poetry and diaries.
While demands on the Morrow children were few, expectations were infinite. The household was a hotbed of achievement with little room for imperfection. Life proved hardest on Dwight Jr., the only boy, carrying the burden of the great man’s name. He was automatically sent to Groton to prepare for Amherst, and before reaching college he began to falter under the pressure, developing a slight stammer. Betty Morrow took greater interest in her daughters.
Elisabeth exceeded her dreams. Blessed with the finest features of her parents, she grew into an exquisite young blonde, delicate in beauty and strong in personality. The apple of her father’s eye talked for years of opening her own primary school. She emulated her mother’s success at Smith College, adding social sheen that came from prestigious parents. “She was the belle of the ball,” noted her youngest sister, Constance, more than sixty years later; “she was sophisticated and graceful and men fell at her feet.” Physically, she was fragile, the result of a childhood bout of measles. Her mother, with her lifelong fear of disease, did not cater to her illness. Although Elisabeth had developed a weak heart with a faulty valve, she knew the way to win her mother’s approval was to carry on as though she were perfectly fine. That valor made her even more attractive to her many suitors. Most ardent of all of them was one of the sons of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, Corliss, who also maintained that “Elisabeth was her mother’s obvious favorite.”
Nine years her junior, Constance would follow her to Milton Academy (and later Smith College) and perform with equal aplomb. Having brains and looks—and young enough not to have to compete with her sisters—she developed the most vibrant personality of all the Morrows.
Anne was caught in the middle of two sisters who seemed to meet their parents’ expectations with grace and ease. Not quite as pretty—dark-haired and forever self-conscious about her slightly wide nose—Anne lagged in Elisabeth’s shadow. More than anyone in her family, she withdrew, finding comfort in reading and writing. By her mid-teens she had become an inveterate diarist and letter-writer.
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.”
Lindbergh insisted upon a national meteorological system, starting with weather stations placed at regular intervals along the TAT route. “On departure from each airport,” Lindbergh wrote in one of his first statements for the company, “planes would be given a complete report of weather conditions then existing along their route and also a prediction of conditions which would exist at any time during the flight.” In some cities that meant a trainmaster stepping outside and looking up at the sky. Soon every station along the TAT line was equipped with a complete weather station, and they were all linked. The company contracted with the Radio Corporation of America to put ground stations and pilots in direct communication with each other and arranged with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to install private teletype service between each of the stations along the way.
TAT prepared to offer forty-eight-hour transcontinental trips in the summer of 1929; and Lindbergh was already anticipating that they might shave twelve hours off that by the time they opened for business. While each of those first planes in the TAT fleet would be able to fly twelve passengers at 105 miles per hour, Lindbergh was inspecting designs for other planes with capacities of thirty-two passengers and speeds up to 130 miles per hour and was foreseeing trips across the continent taking less than twenty-four hours!
Handsomely rewarded—$10,000 a year for chairing the Technical Committee plus a signing bonus of $250,000, with which he could purchase forthwith twenty-five thousand shares of company stock at ten dollars per share—Lindbergh worked hard for his piece of this new industry. He suggested Ford might also manufacture aluminum chairs and a toilet in each of the planes TAT was buying from him; he met with the Acme Milling and Refining Company about new ores and alloys that might be used in planes; he talked to General Electric about producing lights for landing fields and magneto compasses; he recommended that Goodyear manufacture tires especially for desert landings, which would be impervious to mesquite, cactus, and sandburs; he designed a special navigational watch with rotating dials, which A. Wittnauer company produced for him and subsequently sold to the trade.
Lindbergh also granted TAT restricted use of his name in its publicity. After public relations representative Harry Bruno parenthetically referred to the company in a publicity story as “The Lindbergh Line,” he consented to its further use as the company motto. With the publicity came greater responsibility, for Lindbergh knew that any major accident on “his” line “might well be compared with the sinking of the Titanic.”
That spring Lindbergh forged a business relationship with another early mogul of the aviation industry, Juan Terry Trippe. Not of Hispanic origin, as was often assumed—but named for an Aunt Juanita—this enterprising son of a New York banker grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, graduated from Yale in 1920, and served in the War as a Navy flying instructor. With backing from a few of his wealthy schoolmates, including a Whitney and a Vanderbilt, he formed Eastern Air Transport. Two years later he bought two small competing airlines, Pan American, Inc., and Florida Airways, which he merged into Pan American Airways—all before he was thirty. Alternately described as a pioneer and a pirate, Trippe secured the airmail contract between the United States and Cuba. With its rum and gambling, Havana became a favorite vacation hideaway for Prohibition-parched Americans, which Pan American exploited by establishing daily passenger service from Key West.
While their motives differed, Juan Trippe shared Charles Lindbergh’s global visions for aviation. During his five days in Havana on his Caribbean tour, Lindbergh had spent time with Trippe and inspected his base of operation there. He even flew passengers for him, testing one of the new Pan American Fokkers. Both men agreed that after transcontinental routes and before transoceanic routes, it was necessary to span the Americas. More than anybody Lindbergh had met, Trippe had the passion and the power to make that happen. Within months of his TAT deal, Lindbergh also became Technical Adviser to Pan American Airways—again for a salary of $10,000 a year plus the right to purchase about one-tenth of the company’s shares at half their present value. Lindbergh would remain active with the company for more than forty years.
Lindbergh was not merely corporate window dressing. As adviser to two airlines, he took to flying where nobody had before him, selecting and surveying routes. He often tested new planes, determining which were best for his companies to purchase. He set down specifications for Pan American planes from the Sikorsky S-40 amphibian in the early days of flying boats all the way through the Boeing 747 of the jet age. In his earliest discussions with Trippe, Lindbergh considered such projects as: dirigibles for transoceanic routes; floating runways, to be anchored at three-hundred-mile intervals across the Atlantic; buoys with rotating beacons for night flying, to be anchored along the Caribbean route; catapult takeoffs for heavily loaded transoceanic planes; refueling in flight to allow for transoceanic range; microfilming airmail letters to reduce their weight. As Pan Am’s needs differed from TAT’s, there was still a debate between wood or metal construction. In but a matter of years, Lindbergh felt Henry Ford had been right and ordered all-metal monoplanes for the entire Pan Am fleet.
While Lindbergh never cashed in on the $5,000,000 he was offered to endorse products and to appear in movies, within eighteen months of his famous flight, he had earned more than $1,000,000. Lindbergh also received fees up to $10,000 a year for advising the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Daniel Guggenheim Fund; six-figure royalty checks continued to come his way from “We,” as did five-figure checks from The New York Times for his internationally syndicated articles. J. P. Morgan & Company looked after his investments, two-thirds of which were in stocks, mostly blue chips along with companies with which he felt a personal connection, such as the Guggenheims’ Kennecott Copper, Curtiss Flying Service, and a new builder of airplanes, Boeing. Some have suggested that such financial sharpies as Keys and Trippe taught Lindbergh how to avoid income tax; but tax rates were low and Lindbergh’s returns were always scrupulously simple. Compiling his own data, which was vetted by officers of Bankers Trust and Morgan, as well as Colonel Breckinridge, he declared all his income and deducted only the most obvious business expenses. Living nowhere on next to nothing, by age twenty-six, Lindbergh had enough of a nest egg never to have to think about earning money again.
He also saw that his mother, then fifty-two, would be financially secure for the rest of her life. Although Charles started sending her $3,000 semiannually, Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh continued to teach in Detroit. She saw no reason to change the way she lived. At the same time, numerous offers came her way, opportunities to write articles and make personal appearances. In the summer of 1928, Constantinople Woman’s College offered her an appointment as a visiting professor of Chemistry. Besides the chance to travel through Europe and Asia, Evangeline viewed the job as a way of both teaching and investing in “international good will.” She accepted, recruiting as a companion Alice Morrow, whom she had befriended at Christmas in Mexico City. Dwight Morrow’s unmarried older sister had been a teacher in Pittsburgh, and the college was pleased to engage her as its official hostess for the winter semester. The two women sailed together in early September, arriving in Turkey fifteen days later.
Not until his mother was seventy-five hundred miles away did Lindbergh approach what he had targeted as his primary obligation that year—marrying and starting a family. By his own admission, America’s most eligible bachelor “had never been enough interested in any girl to ask her to go on a date.” As a barnstormer, he had resisted the sexual promiscuity that came easily to aviators, finding fly-by-night relationships with women “facile,” offering “little chance for selectivity, hardly any desire for permanence and children.” In the Army there had been a shanty village near the flying field where prostitutes were available, but Lindbergh never crossed its borders. He later wrote that he thought it “was not an environment conducive to evolutionary progress.” His intellectualizing aside, Lindbergh also admitted fifty years later that he had simply been shy and inexperienced and did not want to contend with the problems that attended women—“you had to learn to dance, to talk their language, to escort them properly to restaurants and theaters.”
Lindbergh never got over his schoolboy nervousness. Toward the end of his life, he would write at length about the genetic makeup he had sought in a mate, starting with the obvious—“good health, good form, good sight and hearing.” The specifics descended from there into a discourse that was more about animal husbandry than human relations. He thought he was displaying a dry wit in emoting less about choosing a wife than a farmer might in selecting a cow. In truth, he never did grow comfortable enough to describe the only courtship in his life. “It’s not that he was cold,” remarked one of Anne Morrow’s friends from her first days visiting Mexico; “he was just immature.”
Lindbergh was at a distinct disadvantage in dating. “Girls were everywhere,” Lindbergh wrote objectively of his popularity, “but it was hard to get to know them.” His singular fame created an unnatural air of “awe, respect, and curiosity.” To make matters worse for somebody so inexperienced, the press monitored his every move, ready to turn an innocent glance into an international headline. Reporters trailed him when he began calling on the Morrows that year.
While Anne was still at Smith, he visited Englewood, where her mother and sister Elisabeth were inspecting the construction of their new house. They arranged for Lindbergh to visit the family at the summerhouse they were building at Deacon Brown’s Point on North Haven. During a subsequent phone conversation with Lindbergh, Mrs. Morrow referred to her daughter and Lindbergh asked, “Which daughter?” Elisabeth was taken aback that Lindbergh knew—as she wrote Anne—“there was more than me.” The press was already conjecturing a summer romance between Elisabeth and Lindbergh.
So was Anne. “I don’t think I can bear to face it,” she wrote in her diary, imagining Lindbergh’s visit: “He will come. He will turn quite naturally to E., whom he likes and feels at ease with. I will back out more and more, feeling in the way, stupid, useless, and (in the bottom of my vain heart) hoping that perhaps there is a mistake and that I will be missed.” Her thoughts festered into mild hysteria.
With graduation approaching, Anne became consumed with two dreams, the first largely to keep her mind off the second: she wanted desperately to win the Jordan Prize, awarded for the most original work of prose or verse; and she prayed that Colonel Lindbergh might take some interest in her—that “he liked me.” To protect herself from being hurt, she prepared a line of attack against even allowing herself the latter fancy. “Fool, fool, fool,” she wrote. “You are completely and irretrievably opposed to him. You have nothing in common. You don’t even sincerely care a damn for his world. You are just swept away by the force of his personality.”
Her first dream came true, and then some. At graduation, Anne received not only the Jordan Prize but another for the best essay on women of the eighteenth century. What was more, she had a poem published in Scribner’s. Those triumphs behind her, she could return to fretting about the imminent visit of Lindbergh, as the Morrows set up housekeeping in their new large white summer place, which had cost more than $100,000.
Just as Anne’s anxiety over Lindbergh’s arrival reached fevered pitch, a rainy front descended upon the coast of Maine, preventing him from getting through. Anne felt relieved, until she learned that Colonel Lindbergh changed his flight plan to go to New York. “Elisabeth of course again,” she wrote. “It was like that sudden falling down you have in a dream—kaplunk.” Anne and Constance spent summer nights discussing Elisabeth’s inevitable wedding to Lindbergh. Newspapers reported that their engagement was imminent.
In the fall of 1928, Lindbergh telephoned the Morrow house in Englewood, the first time he had ever called a girl for a date. But he was calling Anne, not Elisabeth. She was not there, and Mrs. Morrow’s secretary, Jo Graeme, told him to telephone the following morning. Refusing to believe that Lindbergh actually wanted her, Anne anxiously grabbed the telephone when he called back. He was just as nervous as she, blurting, “Hello—Miss Anne Morrow—this is Lindbergh himself.” Then he charged forward with an obviously prepared statement about a promise he had made to take her flying. After a conversation that threatened to break off with each sentence, they agreed to see each other the following week.
A few days later, Lindbergh arrived for a meeting to “settle a few points” about their date. “Well,” he explained, thinking of the press, “we can’t go to any of the fields or we’d be engaged the next day. I’ve been engaged to two girls in one week and I haven’t seen either of them.” He laughed and blushed, and so did she. Anne later admitted that she had forgotten how tall and good-looking he was.
On October sixteenth, they met in the New York apartment of friends of the Morrows. Anne had thrown together a motley outfit, riding trousers of Constance’s, a woolen shirt of her mother’s, and thick gray golf stockings of her father’s; she wore her own street hat and high-heeled shoes and red leather coat. “Gosh,” Anne later wrote, “what a mess I looked.” He drove her in his new, black Franklin sedan out to Port Washington, where he had arranged with Harry Guggenheim to use one of his horse pastures as a landing field. On the way out, the awkwardness of their conversation lifted, and she discovered that she could be “perfectly natural with him, say anything to him,” that she “wasn’t a bit afraid of him or even worshipful any more.” Upon arriving at Falaise she felt even closer, seeing how “at home” he was in the splendid surroundings and how comfortable he made her feel.
Toward the end of lunch, Lindbergh excused himself to go to Roosevelt Field, where he had rented a De Havilland Moth. Harry and Carol Guggenheim filled Anne with tales of “Slim” and his practical jokes, then took her out to the field, where Lindbergh landed in the small, open-cockpit biplane. He helped her into a parachute and gave her a quick lesson in the controls. Minutes later, they were in the air, high enough to view both coasts of Long Island at once. “I can’t describe the flying,” Anne later wrote Constance, “—it was too glorious.” By the time Anne had returned to New York City she believed “Colonel L. is the kindest man alive and approachable.” Before they parted, he suggested another flight, perhaps down the New Jersey coast.
Later in the week, Anne and Jo Graeme met him at Teterboro Airport, near Paterson. A reporter was already at Lindbergh’s heels asking, “What general direction are you headed?” Lindbergh replied, “Up”; and Anne stifled a giggle. Then he flew his two passengers over the islands of New York City, as far south as Lakehurst, while the setting October sun bathed the entire city in golden light.
By the time Anne and her chaperone had returned to Englewood, reporters were calling and had even staked out the house. A newspaper in Mexico had surmised that the Morrow daughter seen flying with Lindbergh was Elisabeth. Even worse, Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow had clumsily addressed the mistake instead of ignoring it, telling the Embassy staff, “It wasn’t Elisabeth, it was Anne—isn’t it funny?”
The “joke” even got laughs overseas. Elisabeth Morrow had come down with bronchial pneumonia while traveling abroad and was recuperating in the Mayfair residence of Edward Grenfell, the English partner of the Morgan Bank. “Were you the person I read about in the London paper which said, ‘Young, pretty, sparkling, vivacious girl flies with Lone Eagle—resembles Miss Elisabeth Morrow’?” Elisabeth inquired of her younger sister. “Mrs. Grenfell showed it to me and we both roared.”
Anne was humiliated, cheered only when Lindbergh visited again that night and got her joking about the press reports. After supper, he took Anne for a drive in his Franklin through a dense fog. For hours they talked, covering a wide range of topics, from politics to his image in the press. He spoke of aviation in a way that made Anne understand that he saw it as but a means to greater ends. “The thing that interests me now,” Lindbergh said to her, “is breaking up the prejudices between nations, linking them up through aviation.”
When Anne lowered her guard and told him that she hoped to write, he seemed to understand her passion. He even volunteered that he wished he could write. Repeatedly dumbfounded by the sensitivity of his comments, Anne was finding their silences as comfortable as their conversation. By the time they had returned to Palisade Avenue, she felt completely safe with him. She wrote up the entire evening in her diary and in letters to Constance, all except two salient details: Charles Lindbergh asked her to marry him; and she consented. They agreed not to tell anybody until he had addressed her parents in person.
Lindbergh had fallen in love with Anne Morrow. The evidence of his feelings overwhelmed all the practical considerations he had detailed in his autobiography. The attraction between him and Anne was so strong that he completely overlooked the Morrow family’s physical and mental health problems, which he once would have considered obstacles.
Anne was leaving that week for Mexico City, and Charles wondered how he might join her without drawing attention to his trip. By chance, the American military attaché in Mexico invited Lindbergh on a hunting expedition in the northern plains of Coahuila, and Ambassador Morrow asked him to stay at the Embassy afterward. Stopping in St. Louis to vote (for Herbert Hoover), Charles arrived in Mexico City on Friday, November ninth. After dinner that night, Anne and Charles and a young embassy employee went to a dance at the home of Eman Beck, a longtime resident of Mexico City, whose daughter Susanna was becoming one of Anne’s closest friends. For once, Anne enjoyed herself, clutching her secret as she watched the adoring women flit around her fiancé.
The next day, Dwight and Betty Morrow took Anne and Lindbergh to the weekend house they had just bought in Cuernavaca, fifty miles south. The Ambassador and Lindbergh talked agriculture all the way down, mostly about cows. The Morrows’ sprawling place—which they cleverly named “Casa Mañana”—was enchanting, with red tiled terraces and roofs, tropically planted courtyards, and a swimming pool. Sunday morning, sitting alone with Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow, Charles announced his intentions.
“I think that I can never be surprised again,” Betty Morrow would write in her diary later that night. “I am stunned.” Upon hearing the news, she rushed to find her daughter and enjoyed a few minutes alone with her in their mirador, a third-floor tower that overlooked all of Cuernavaca. “Anne,” she said, mustering all her best wishes, “you’ll have the sky!—the sky!” At the same time, she saw that her daughter was “all trembling and upset—& very fearful of herself.”
“I think she loves him,” Betty Morrow added in her diary. But she had doubts. Anne and Charles had only met four times since Christmas; and they seemed to have come from two different worlds. Before going to sleep that night, Betty checked on her daughter only to find Anne sitting on the side of her bed. “Oh, Mother,” she said, “I am so happy.”
Lindbergh remained in Mexico with the Morrows for two weeks, as they all tried to get used to the startling news. The Ambassador, who had until that time been nothing less than worshipful, was heard grumbling more than once, “What do we know about this young man?” He urged the young lovers to take some time to get acquainted. Lindbergh had no doubts about the marriage, but he agreed to postpone an announcement as long as possible because he feared the avalanche of publicity.
“He is utterly utterly different from me,” Anne kept telling her mother, “but it’s all right.” By the end of the fortnight, Betty was not completely convinced, though she was sure that Anne was. “I don’t believe that she will change,” Mrs. Morrow wrote. “I think she is thoroughly in love with Lindbergh. She understands that they are very different—she sees clearly that. There are some things she is going to lose—but he is a romantic figure & a fine virile man who has conquered her imagination. I can’t imagine it—but I must.” Anne and Charles spoke of a private wedding in North Haven. But until they knew exactly when that would be, they wanted to release no word of the engagement. Lindbergh suggested that the resumption of their separate lives—he returning to his aviation work, she remaining with her family in Mexico—would throw the press completely off their scent.
Until their announcement, Charles insisted that nobody must know, except the few people to whom he and Anne would reveal the news themselves. The Morrows’ diplomatic skills were put to the ultimate test that very week when they withheld the news from their daughter Elisabeth, just returning from Europe and being met at the docks by hordes of reporters asking about her engagement to Colonel Lindbergh!
Charles informed his mother in Constantinople by mail in two short sentences. “When you are happy,” she wrote back, “I am satisfied, for you deserve the greatest happiness life has to offer. You have been too fine always in your attitude toward me for me to be able even to write about it.”
Anne and Charles remained apart for most of the next three months, bonded by their great secret and growing affection for each other. Through letters, discreet telephone calls, and coded telegrams, Lindbergh carried on his first romantic relationship. Despite the separation, he felt her love.
The feeling was mutual. “The sheer fact of finding myself loved was unbelievable and changed my world, my feeling about life and myself,” Anne would write forty-five years later. “The man I was to marry believed in me and what I could do, and consequently I found I could do more than I realized, even in that mysterious outer world that fascinated me but seemed unattainable. He opened the door to ‘real life’ and although it frightened me, it also beckoned. I had to go.”
While she spent the autumn between Mexico and Englewood, Anne revealed her secret to a few friends. “I don’t expect to be happy,” she confessed to former beau Corliss Lamont, “but it’s gotten beyond that, somehow.” Instead, she hoped he would wish her “courage and strength and a sense of humor.”
In December 1928, the Morrows’ big, new Georgian house was completed, which they called Next Day Hill. Exuding stately grace, the white-painted brick house with stone trim lorded over more than seventy-five acres. In the end, it cost $400,000, complete with morning room, formal library, and a pine living room transported from an old great house in England. Another quarter-million dollars was spent on the furniture and landscaping. The backyard included a dozen vast flower beds, an old apple orchard, and profusions of Betty Morrow’s favorite flowers, columbines and larkspur. On New Year’s Eve, between four and seven, the Morrows hosted their first party at Next Day Hill, a housewarming attended by nearly one thousand people. The buzz that evening was that Lindbergh might appear and that his engagement to Elisabeth might be announced.
By February, the press was closing in on the truth. Finally, at four o’clock on the twelfth—while Anne was in Mexico City and Charles was in the air between the cities of Belize and Havana, carrying the first airmail between the two American continents—a beaming Ambassador Morrow invited the newspaper correspondents into his Embassy office. When they had all assembled, he leaned over his desk and handed each reporter a small slip of paper on which was typewritten: “Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow announce the engagement of their daughter, Anne Spencer Morrow, to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.” When pressed for details, Morrow said only, “In matters like this, one guess is as good as another.” When reporters caught up with Lindbergh, he evasively added, “Well, then, you know all about it. I have nothing to say.”
Within two hours, a friend called the Morrows from Englewood to say the news had been broadcast over the radio. Over the next few weeks, the Embassy received thousands of letters and presents from statesmen and strangers alike. Most of the messages were congratulatory, though millions of hearts around the world were broken. One young girl wrote that she did not really think Anne was pretty enough. Lindbergh’s name was everywhere again, in bold type—“‘WE’ NOW A TRIO.” The entire nation rejoiced anew over this crowning touch to the two-year celebration of the Lone Eagle’s triumph. Six Ziegfeld Girls offered to serve as bridesmaids.
Anne Morrow had remained so veiled from the public eye that many newspapers around the world mistakenly published a picture of Lindbergh sitting with the parents of his fiancée and Constance. “Unlike most brides-to-be,” Anne later remarked, “it was I who was congratulated, not he.” One member of the Embassy merrily sang, “She was only an ambassador’s daughter, but he was Prince of the air.” Anne thought of him less as a prince than a “knight in shining armor,” and she as his attendant. “The role of page came naturally to me,” Anne later realized. She did not think that role was a good basis for a marriage, but she thought it was good for her own development—“a role I could play until I grew up.” Until then, she could continue to live in somebody else’s shadow.
Her sister Elisabeth seemed genuinely happy just being a “bridesmaid.” “It is the most perfect and beautiful thing that ever happened,” she had written her mother when she learned the news, two weeks before the public announcement. “Of course there will be times when she will have hard and difficult situations to face but they will make her stronger and more capable of living fully. She will always be protected and loved by her husband.” And at Milton Academy, Constance Morrow had tapped her water glass at dinner the night before the news hit the papers to make the announcement to her schoolmates in Hathaway House. There was tremendous applause and shrieks of surprise. At the next school social, she was stunned to find herself so popular, cut in on every dance. Dwight Jr. had recently entered Amherst, but his mental health once again forced him to drop out of school, this time for treatment with Dr. Austen Fox Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; but he was excited when told that he would be able to attend the wedding.
While the engagement was a feather in the caps of the Ambassador and his wife, they remained properly concerned about their daughter’s welfare. “Poor child!” Betty noted. “With all the world congratulating her, she is having many hard moments.” Within days, Charles had joined Anne in Mexico, and she felt suffused with “faith and courage” every time she looked at him. As he gave her nerve, she gave him heart.
Later that week Charles and Anne stole away from the Embassy, flying from Valbuena Field for a private picnic alone on a prairie. Taking off again after their lunch, Lindbergh looked outside the Travel Air cabin monoplane he had borrowed and saw one of its wheels rolling along the ground. To make matters worse, the plane had no safety belts. Charles explained the problem to Anne, but not the possible repercussions. He said that they would fly around for hours, reducing both the load of gasoline and the danger of explosion on impact. He padded Anne with the two seat cushions and instructed her to open the windows so they could crawl out if the plane tipped over. At last, they circled the field, where a frantic crowd had gathered, signaling not to land—as though they had an option. Charles and Anne looked at each other and laughed. Then he began his approach, coming down slowly. With one hand he controlled the plane; with the other he braced himself, grabbing a tube of the fuselage structure. He brought the plane down on one wheel, keeping the opposite axle balanced high for thirty yards before it gouged the ground and the plane turned turtle. Anne suffered but one moment of silent panic, wondering how she would appear in his eyes if she could not face this test. But by the time she realized what had happened, she had crawled out the window and was perfectly fine. He had dislocated his shoulder.
“Anne very cool & composed through it all,” her mother observed, “& he is awfully proud of her. I should think he would be!” Although he had a good excuse not to, the next evening Charles insisted on appearing with Anne at a large diplomatic dinner at the Embassy—with his arm in a sling, rigged to a colorful scarf tied around his waist. Terrifying though the plane crash had been, Betty Morrow could not help noticing how the shared experience drew Anne and Charles closer together. “I believe a beautiful thrilling life is ahead of them,” she wrote an old friend, “—if only the papers will let them alone after they are married.”
Within ten days, Lindbergh left to pilot the inaugural flight between Mexico City and Brownsville, Texas, for Pan American Airways. He spent most of March traveling on airline business, while Anne remained in Mexico, out of sight. By then, there was no doubt in her mind that she was making the right decision, but she found it difficult making one adjustment in particular. Her “intensely private” husband was determined to “keep intact this most private of all relationships”; and toward that end, he had warned his fiancée, “Never say anything you wouldn’t want shouted from the housetops, and never write anything you would mind seeing on the front page of a newspaper.” Anne believed “an experience was not finished until it was written or shared in conversation”; and, as a result, she kept no thought unexpressed either in diaries or any of a dozen active correspondences all her life. She believed this “lid of caution … clapped down on all spontaneous expression” would be the most difficult adjustment she would have to make.
Lindbergh, of course, had grown accustomed to the ubiquity of reporters and false stories. But it hurt him now to see Anne and her family turned into innocent victims of this cat-and-mouse game, having their privacy invaded. Reporters camped outside the gates of Next Day Hill, and photographers hid in the woods around Deacon Brown’s Point, North Haven. Morrow servants were regularly offered money for information about the young couple; and the Hearst syndicate even bribed a workman to steal a cache of Anne’s letters. Whenever Anne and Charles went driving, they were followed. Charles and Anne instinctively learned to confine themselves to the private estates of family and friends.
Newspapers reported presumptions about the Lindbergh wedding, its guest list growing each week. The media assumed a June wedding in North Haven and a honeymoon by airplane. Because the press had standing cash offers with workers at most airports for any word of Lindbergh’s flying activities, Lindbergh secretly placed an order with an officer of the Elco Company for a boat, a thirty-eight-foot motor cruiser. Then, the third week of May, he ordered his Curtiss Falcon flown to Rochester with instructions to leave it in a hangar fully serviced. As Lindbergh suspected, the press migrated to Roosevelt Field and northern New York, keeping their eyes peeled for a large gathering of Morrows and other dignitaries. They showed no special interest in Dwight Morrow’s returning to New Jersey on the last Sunday of the month for a birthday party for his wife.
Although the secret was kept from even the few who had been invited for tea the next day, Monday, May 27, 1929, was chosen for Anne and Charles’s wedding. She walked through most of the morning in a daze, picking lilies of the valley and tulips in the backyard to decorate the house. Later, with her mother, sisters, and childhood friend Vernon Munroe, Anne went to the old house on Palisade Avenue, where they cut forget-me-nots and cream columbine and a few sprays of light blue larkspur. Elisabeth arranged the flowers into a bridal bouquet. Charles and his mother arrived from New York together, joining Anne’s grandmother and two maternal aunts and the rest of the Morrows for lunch. Anne was too nervous to eat.
Mid-afternoon, Charles excused himself to the library, where he spent a few minutes making a two-and-one-half-page holographic will. In the event of his death he wished to create a trust fund of $200,000 for his mother, and he bequeathed the remainder of his estate to Anne. He also suggested that she select any items she wished from the exhibit of his belongings at the Jefferson Memorial in St. Louis, the rest to be left to the historical society for a permanent exhibit. The will was primarily for Evangeline Lindbergh’s protection, as Anne’s own trust fund was then worth a half million dollars.
The other guests arrived around four, driving past an indifferent coterie of reporters. A hush hung over the house, creating a funereal mood, or so joked Elisabeth. There was a handful of people from Dwight Morrow’s side and another few of Betty Morrow’s dearest friends. Dwight Jr. was, in fact, too ill to leave the sanitarium in Massachusetts. Charles had only his mother. Then Reverend Dr. William Adams Brown of the Union Theological Seminary appeared, and it was clear that a wedding ceremony was about to occur. They were twenty-two present in all, the bridal couple included.
Anne readied herself in the ladies’ dressing room downstairs. She wore a simple gown of cream-white chiffon—made by the local dressmaker who had sewn clothes for the Morrow daughters since they had been children—and blue heeled slippers. A maid helped Anne with the French lace veil, which fell to her shoulders. Charles, in his blue suit, came into the room, shut the door, and went over to reassure her. At that moment, Anne later recorded, “I knew it would be all right.” Then her father, mother, and sisters entered. Each of the women kissed her, before proceeding to the large living room, hidden from the street and overlooking the gardens.
Dwight Morrow smiled at Anne, “very gently & happily,” and offered his arm. Together they walked before the hushed group facing the fireplace. In an instant Reverend Brown recited an abbreviated service. Anne and Charles quietly answered his ritual questions, and he slipped the ring on her finger. (It was made from gold nuggets that had been presented to him in Honduras.) Afterward, people approached to kiss her. There were no photographs.
Everybody walked out to the enclosed piazza for refreshments. There was a large fruitcake by Madame Blanche of New York City. It had been made weeks earlier, with a frosting that had become rock-hard. Nobody had read the special instructions from Madame Blanche, saying that a knife had to be dipped in boiling water before attempting each slice. As it was, Charles sawed away at this nearly impenetrable block.
In the middle of everybody’s joy, Betty Morrow experienced a moment of terror. As she whispered to Charles that she would get a sharper knife, he grabbed her by the wrist and growled “No! No!” in a tone she had never heard before and would never forget. He managed to hack through the cake, and pieces were passed around.
Anne quietly went upstairs to change into a French blue suit and a blue felt hat. Her mother and sisters followed to say good-bye. At 4:30, everybody waved as the newlyweds slipped out the back of the house and into a car. Charles and Anne drove past the entourage of newsmen waiting at the bottom of the hill, just as they had many times when they went for a drive. The press corps pursued them, but the newlyweds gave them the slip, driving down a blind alley in which Henry Breckinridge was waiting in Lindbergh’s Franklin. They exchanged cars. Donning caps and dark glasses, Charles and Anne started their long drive to Long Island. They stopped once to jot and post notes to Betty Morrow. “I do not believe it would be possible to have even wished for a more perfect occasion,” Charles wrote his mother-in-law.
The guests lingered at Next Day Hill until 6:45. Not until then had a word about the wedding been released. On his way home, one of the Morrows’ friends spoke to the reporters at the bottom of the drive and let the cat out of the bag. By seven o’clock it was on the radio. A few minutes later, Dwight Morrow’s secretary, Arthur Springer, distributed to the newsmen the official announcement, one sentence in length; he took no questions. That same afternoon, the Daily News carried an article announcing that Lindbergh would be marrying soon, before an assembly of fifteen hundred.
With their two-hour jump on the press, Charles and Anne reached their destination on the Sound at ten o’clock, undetected. According to plan, they found a dinghy tied to a tree, which they hauled by flashlight to the water. As a cold wind blew, Charles rowed his bride out to their cruiser, the Mouette, which waited there with lights shining, beckoning them to begin their voyage together.