Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (13 page)

Anne’s one sweet victory lay in her ability to write, but she was certain her mother wouldn’t approve. Her letters begged her mother for acceptance, urging her to remember her own youthful ambitions to be a writer. She buried her anger beneath “Mother Darling” and gratitude, as if her words might exorcise her mother’s contempt. Eager for praise, but afraid that her mother would not approve of her free-form style, so different from her own classical quatrains, Anne did not send her poems or stories home.
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Her hunger for the approval of an older woman, however, was satisfied by the admiration of her writing teacher, Mina Kirstein.

Tall, dark, and elegant, Mina Kirstein was a charismatic teacher with high expectations and a generous disposition. If she believed a student was both talented and “serious,” there was “nothing she wouldn’t do to encourage her.”
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The brilliant and ambitious daughter of wealthy German Jews, also a graduate of Smith, she overflowed with ideas and energy. She could dominate a classroom like “a ship at full sail.” Unfortunately, she also dominated her students’ lives. Anne, uncertain of her own worth, was drawn to Mina’s nurturing will. In 1924, when
she enrolled in Miss Kirstein’s creative writing course, she was unaware of the teacher’s life of promiscuous sex and social-climbing adultery, and was delighted by the encouragement to submit her works for publication in
The Smith College Monthly
, the literary magazine. Anne wrote to her mother that the praise was “heart-warming.” Perhaps it wasn’t true and it wouldn’t last, but nonetheless it was satisfying.

But try as she might to rekindle the spontaneity of her high school writing, she was overwhelmed by self-doubt. She wrote in her diary, “There is a kind of wall made of paper and the pen and the scratchy noise of the two; a wall between my thoughts and wishes and their expression.”

In her junior year, happily, the wall itself became her inspiration. If she couldn’t penetrate it, she could wish it away. In her poem “Caprice,”
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written for the magazine, she tried to persuade an Angel to make her into a scarlet Spanish dancer:

But, says the Angel, there is only room for brown-haired Quaker Maidens.

By the time Anne arrived in Mexico for the Christmas holiday during her senior year, her independence had begun to crystallize. Long
disenchanted with her parents’ restraint and pretensions, hungry for something substantial and real, Anne had already left her “beribboned” childhood behind. Charles Lindbergh was the mirror of her ambitions, someone capable of making his own rules. From the moment her eyes locked into his, even before she flew in his plane, she heard the melody of her “scarlet” dance.

A
nne Morrow, the Colonel’s lady, 1929
.

(Brown Brothers)

A
fter the sunlit gardens of Mexico, Anne found Northampton bleak and oppressive. The winter light cast ashen shadows, covering the campus in a heavy pall. But inside the walls, the air was conflagatory. Anne learned that a freshman, Frances Smith, had disappeared, and rumors of her suicide swept through its halls.
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The “horror,” Anne wrote, was beyond words or imagining. The questions—the relentless interrogations by police and reporters shrouded an enveloping cloud that changed the face of everything. Most terrible was the realization that her friend had died and that she had done nothing to stop it.

Before the Christmas holiday, Anne had been asked to give Frances counsel. But Frances’s fears were much like her own. Feelings of inadequacy, along with a vivid imagination, had made her shy, lonely, and withdrawn. Even as a child, Anne learned, Frances had fallen into trance-like states, in which she isolated herself from family and friends; this time, however, she had no hope of return. Feeling “weightless,” as though she could “fly,” she had thrown herself into the Connecticut River.
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Several months later, the police found her body bloated and misshapen, but not decomposed, in an orange dress and a red coat.

Anne, preoccupied by Lindbergh, feared she might meet a similar end. She, too, had flying fantasies and wondered whether she was going mad. Frances’s mother insisted that Anne could have helped her daughter; that Anne was the only friend Frances loved. Sleepless with guilt
and anxiety, wondering what she should have done, Anne waited for each dawn by counting the hours. Every morning at exactly four-thirty, she would rehearse her memories of Lindbergh’s take-off from Mexico.
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She recalled their breakfast by the embassy fireplace, their drive through the deserted streets to the airport, the excitement of watching his silver plane rise defiantly over the earth, catching the first glow of morning.
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While Anne cloaked herself in darkness, she wrote in her diary, Lindbergh transformed life with his “burning intensity.”
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The American public agreed.

Lindbergh, counted among the miracles of the New Year, was hailed by American clergy as the quintessence of Christian virtue.
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Leaving Mexico City on December 28, 1927, he flew 9,060 miles, circling the coast of Central and South America, through the islands of the Caribbean, and back along the gulf coast of Florida through Georgia and Texas to St. Louis, Missouri. Hailed as a divine emissary of peace and good will,
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he received a hero’s welcome in every capital. Once again, thousands of people stormed his plane, surging toward him with frightening force and lifting him high above them.
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Parades were staged; holidays declared.
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Stamps were issued, and streets were named in his honor.

The
New York Times
quoted the chairman of the Senate Library Committee as saying:

Little did the press know that the daughter of Dwight and Betty Morrow was already sweet on Lindbergh. But just as Anne’s spirits rose with his memory, she was “terrified” by a call from Elisabeth. Their brother, Dwight Jr., was “very ill.”
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In fact, Dwight had had a nervous breakdown when he returned to Groton after the Christmas holiday.
The father had tried to rally young Dwight by writing him letters like those of a football coach, hoping to inspire moral rectitude. But nothing Morrow said or wrote was able to penetrate Dwight’s fear and self-doubt.
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Two thousand miles away in Mexico, Betty and Dwight tried to deny the severity of Dwight’s illness, insisting to each other that his breakdown would be swift and passing. On Valentine’s Day, 1928, drowning in a deluge of diplomatic celebrations, Dwight Sr. wrote a letter of gratitude to Elisabeth, who had taken a leave of absence from her teaching post at school in Englewood to help care for her brother. He reassured her that Dwight would recover as soon as he was able to get some rest.
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But the breakdown was more serious than the Morrows were willing to admit. Their son was hallucinatory and delirious.

Anne had a special feeling for Dwight. In spite of his intelligence and driving ambition, he was as sensitive and vulnerable as she. Dwight always seemed a piece of herself, and now his illness made her question her sanity. Exploring madness in her diary, Anne projected herself into the mind of Frances, alienated, alone, and the object of ridicule.
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Trying to understand Dwight’s breakdown, trying to grasp his pain, she imagined her death. “Useless” and good for nothing, she would gladly have exchanged her life for his.

The thoughts of madness turned back to Lindbergh and love, however, when her old boyfriend P announced his engagement. She hadn’t wanted to marry him; she just didn’t like being left behind. Resolutely, Anne denounced romantic love, affirming only the love for her family.
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Yet her parents were far away, and their house in Englewood was no longer a refuge. She returned to school from a weekend visit feeling “poked … pulled … hurried.”
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Lonely and confused, Anne at times felt small and worthless; at others, strong and in control. Consolation and perspective came only through writing and observations of nature.

“I must say over and over to myself, Make your world count.”
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She wanted to live an honest and purposeful life. Perhaps she would teach or find the courage to write. She would immerse herself in the things
she loved—literature, art, music, and nature—but, like her mother and father, she would dedicate herself to others, finding happiness as a wife and a mother.

By March, spring held the promise of reconciliation. For the first time since Anne’s return from Mexico, she had faith in the rhythm and goodness of life.
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She wondered if it was selfish to want happiness and love when the mere turning of the seasons offered so many “miracles.”
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The real miracle she wanted was Charles Lindbergh, and try as Anne did to hide her feelings from family and friends, Elisabeth had caught on. Anne’s need to idolize others, noted Elisabeth, was an old pattern. With Lindbergh, it had reached a new dimension.
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The only way to dispel her anguish, Anne decided, was to erase Lindbergh from her thoughts. She turned to books, gardening, and food in an attempt to regain her composure.

But Lindbergh felt out of control, too. By the time he returned from his Latin American tour, in mid-February 1928, he had had enough of the limelight. Mauled by overzealous fans, exhausted from giving speeches and signing autographs, he was weary of good-will flights. At a luncheon given by the Guggenheim Fund, he announced that it would be his last official function. It was time for him to “retire to a private life.”
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Lindbergh’s desire for privacy ignited a debate about his rights and responsibilities as a public figure. While the media justified their intrusion by declaring Lindbergh’s life a matter of “public record,” private citizens urged compassion for the “boy-hero” whom “Fame” had taken in her hand.
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