Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (17 page)

Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh in Mexico City, 1929
.
(AP/Wide World Photos)

R
eporters surrounded the American Embassy, swooping like vultures in search of prey, hoping to catch the perfect vignette, the symbolic gesture, the definitive glance. The Morrows had thought they understood fame, but the adulation of the Mexican people, consumed by political chaos, bore no resemblance to the idolatry that now began to envelop them. The public wanted to possess Lindbergh—even at the expense of Lindbergh himself. And the Morrows were part of the spoils.

Hundreds of letters and telegrams made their way to the embassy, congratulating Betty and Dwight on their daughter’s engagement. When Charles returned to the United States for “a maiden voyage” of the new Latin America mail routes of Pan Am Airways, Anne stayed in Mexico with her parents. Day after day, she sat at her desk, responding to those with familiar names, hiding her frustration beneath the jargon of etiquette and social amenity. More than anything, she wanted to be worthy of her parents’ legacy and live up to the standards set by Charles Lindbergh. But there was a piece of Anne that wondered whether Lindbergh could measure up to her. The initial relief that came with her decision had quickly faded again into doubt. She whose life was defined
by contemplation and study, she who thrived on sharing her thoughts with her sisters and analyzing her experiences in her diary, was suddenly unable to write or to move freely. Still, she tried to put on a strong face for Charles.

On Valentine’s Day, 1929, she wrote him a letter hoping to put his mind at ease, but her anger seeped through to its surface. His absence had put an unfair burden on her, and she confided her fears and her loneliness. Everything, she wrote, seemed “horribly unreal” and her doubts seemed ridiculous when everyone was telling her how lucky she was.
²
But more than anything, she resented Charles’s warning not to write letters.
³
It was as if he had sucked the life out of her—writing was her only way of keeping perspective. Now her words, if leaked to the press, could be used against them.

Yet Anne had a gnawing fear that even if she were to write, Charles would not hear her. She feared that their differences—their needs and ways of loving—would have no common ground.
⁴

Yet whenever she remembered his eyes, their beauty and intensity left her without a choice.
⁵
But where were they? Lindbergh came and went at will. Except from newspaper reports, Anne had no idea where he was. Her finest instincts suddenly seemed wrong or dangerous. Moments of solitude, once filled with “dark creativity,” did not bring her solace. Nothing had any substance. She was an image, a plaything of the press, and even those close to her found it difficult to be sympathetic. She had, after all, won the prize.
⁶

After two weeks, which seemed to Anne like years, Charles sent notice of his arrival. Hoping to outrun the press, the Morrow family packed their bags to meet Charles at their mountain retreat in Cuernavaca.

After eleven hours in the air from El Paso to Mexico City, Charles motored by car from the embassy, arriving at the Morrow home at nine that evening. Looking delightfully ruffled and carefree, he seemed eager to be alone with Anne. They climbed up to the
mirador
and talked in the moonlight, happy just to be together again.
⁷
The whole family reveled in Charles’s presence as they watched the couple sit together,
heads bent close, nodding intently, just like lovers about to be married.
⁸

After two days of dealing with family and reporters, Anne and Charles were eager for time alone. Secretly, they planned a day of flying into the mountains and the valleys beyond. On February 27, Charles rose early to speak with correspondents. Observers noted that he was more reticent and evasive than usual. Later that morning, Anne and Charles took an embassy car to Valbuena airport and flew off, unannounced, in a borrowed Travelair cabin monoplane.

Once in flight, they set their course for the desolate prairieland beyond the city, where they could picnic alone. On the way home, Anne took the controls while Charles surveyed the land below. He noticed that a wheel had fallen off the plane, and feared that the axle would catch the ground and capsize the plane when they tried to land. Anticipating the danger of explosion on impact, he reduced the gasoline on board by flying around for several hours. Aware that he and Anne would be tossed around the cabin, Charles put Anne in the back seat, padded her with a big flying suit and cushion, and told her to open the windows and hold on to the seat bottom. He planned to fly the controls with one hand and grip the fuselage with the other. An attempt to land on one wheel did not work; as he had anticipated, the plane caught the ground and accelerated forty miles an hour through the thin mountain air.
⁹

Anne was certain this was a test she had to pass, and she was certain, if she failed, he would think her a coward.
¹⁰
But the test came and went without her notice. Anne emerged from the aircraft frightened but unscathed; Charles, unshaken, had dislocated his shoulder. Who and what had been tested was a matter of opinion. For Anne, it was a test of her trust in Charles. For Betty Morrow, it was a test of how well Charles could protect her daughter. But for Charles, it was a test of the future of aviation. From the moment he left the plane, he was careful to assuage the fears of the anxious public. As rescuers helped him out of the cockpit, he grinned and clutched his injured right shoulder. Pale beneath his deep Mexican tan, aware that his words would echo around
the world, he called the crash a minor “mishap” that might have happened to anyone.
¹¹
“Mishap.” It was a new word for Anne, and a new way of talking about her experience. She too would have to choose her words.

Anne smiled tentatively as Charles answered the reporters’ questions. Taking her by the arm, Charles led her toward the hangar, several hundred yards away, but as they went to their car, the reporters turned to Anne.

“How do you feel?” they asked.

“Augustus will speak for me,”
¹²
Anne answered, shielding herself behind Charles. In one nearly invisible moment, by using Lindbergh’s royal middle name,
¹³
Anne had defined her public stance. Her own words would not suffice. From now on Charles would be her voice. It was one more price she paid for her Prince.

As the public response began to reach a crescendo, Charles knew he had to act quickly. That night, with his shoulder and arm bandaged, he and Anne returned to the site of the crash. Three days later, they went flying again.
¹⁴

The public was enthusiastic. “Lindy” was praised for his social commitment and Anne and her parents for their indomitable courage. Will Rogers summed it up:

While “Little Miss Anne” was at a loss for words, Betty Morrow was suddenly prolific. In the days following Anne and Charles’s engagement, Betty’s entries in her stark, shopping-list diary became self-conscious literary essays, alive with detail and local color. The regime of President Calles had been threatened by revolt, and with uncharacteristic interest, Betty probed its meaning as if she had taken her place in
history. She accused Calles of starting a revolution and conducting himself like a dictator. Betty felt like a prisoner of Mexico—none of them could leave the country now.
¹⁶

In the national election of 1928, Calles was precluded from succeeding himself as president, according to the 1917 constitution. He had stepped aside for Alvaro Obregón, a radical reformer and political ally who, as president from 1920 to 1924, had carried the country through the bloodiest years of the civil war to prosperity. When Obregón was assassinated by a religious fanatic who resented his anticlerical views, Calles formed the National Revolutionary Party and appointed himself its leader.

But the revolution had an unintended consequence. It distracted the press from Anne and Charles and had the salutary effect of locking Charles into the Morrows’ country retreat for nearly three weeks. Anne and Charles spent more time together during those weeks than in the fifteen months since they had met. Lindbergh’s presence, however, set the household on edge. Constrained inside the country villa, Charles seemed to explode with energy, tearing through the rooms like a runaway train.
¹⁷

Elisabeth’s loneliness became more intense with Lindbergh’s presence, and she poured it out in letters to Connie. She too was a target of publicity and a never-ending slave to embassy propriety. Most of all, she was crazy with boredom. Tired of parties and the social scene, Elisabeth wanted to teach in the nearby Catholic orphanage. She complained of intestinal grippe and low spirits; only Connie assuaged her loneliness. Unlike Anne, who doubted that Charles was listening, Elisabeth knew that she was being heard.

As the revolution raged outside the walls, there was a minor insurrection within. With hours alone and time to pass, Charles, Anne, Betty, and Dwight discussed wedding plans. Betty wanted a traditional Presbyterian ceremony and a properly decorous affair; Anne and Charles had in mind something simpler. While Betty made her plans with great excitement, devising a list of essential guests,
¹⁸
Anne wondered why she even had to wear a wedding dress. Anne wanted her own kind
of wedding, one not bound by her parents’ rules. Using Charles as her buffer, she challenged her parents’ wishes. With Charles now speaking for both of them, Betty and Dwight had to listen. By the time Charles left, on March 14, Anne’s happiness was evident. She announced she was certain that Charles was the “right” person. She told her family she was “sure
sure sure.”
¹⁹

But within twenty-four hours of Charles’s leaving, Anne’s fears returned. She began to see both sides of the ledger; Charles’s voice was obliterating her own. Handling her parents and the press were practical necessities, but she would not trade marriage for her love of literature and philosophy or the possibility of becoming a writer. She had to be sure that Charles would respect her differences and her needs.

On March 15, Anne began a long letter to Charles, and continued it over the course of several days.
²⁰
It was a kaleidoscopic representation of her thoughts, sometimes philosophical, sometimes reflective, sometimes wistful and poetic. She quoted from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, seeking, she wrote, “recollection in tranquillity;” she described “sunlight through a jar of marmalade” and told him of her mysterious longing for the sea. But somewhere in the middle she lost her nerve. Desperately seeking the words with which to gain Charles’s notice and approval, Anne realized she was talking to herself, perhaps risking more than she knew. By the end of the letter, she apologized profusely, begging Charles to forgive her foolish thoughts.