Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (20 page)

The cruel joke, of course, was that Elisabeth was alone. In spite of her acknowledged beauty and cultivated mind, the “golden girl” of the Morrow family was facing the prospect of spinsterhood. Elisabeth knew she was different from Anne. She felt different, in fact, from most women—less desirous of men, more fragile, more lonely, and certainly more ambitious. She would not settle for an ordinary marriage, like so many of her friends and millions of women. For the first time, as if exchanging one dream for another, she articulated the idea of establishing a school.
¹¹

At the age of twenty-five, Elisabeth saw a school as a surrogate family. Her only escape from her parents’ gilded cage was to play the system against itself, converting her wealth and social standing into tools of influence and revolt. And in 1929, establishing a nursery school for the rich was an act of rebellion. Such schools may have been considered suitable for the poor and orphaned, but “progressive” upper-class nursery schools were seen as radical institutions. They took children away from their mothers and homes, challenging the families’ mores and structure. Steeped in John Dewey’s belief in developing the individual child, progressive schools wrested power from the parents and handed it to professional educators, who had redefined their roles. No longer taskmasters
whipping the wayward, teachers were the “guides” and “co-workers” of the child. For Elisabeth, this was a petticoat insurrection clothed in the patrician culture of her parents. It was an attempt to give children the voice and autonomy that neither she nor her siblings had had.
¹²

The same ordinary people who chilled Elisabeth with their meaningless lives now heatedly awaited news of her sister. For more than a week, the press cruised the coast by air and boat from the Long Island Sound to the coast of Maine, searching for the celebrated newlyweds.

On June 4, the Lindberghs’ honeymoon came to a swift end when a big yellow flying boat swooped down past their yacht as it nosed into the harbor at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. Anne disappeared into the cabin, and Charles, sun-tanned and relaxed in his white duck trousers and open shirt, remained at the wheel. As he approached the wharf, a reporter and a cameraman cornered him. For a week, Anne and Charles had lived like “nobodies,” moving and drifting as they pleased, but now the hunt that had started at Englewood was resumed with a vengeance. Hundreds of planes and boats surged up the New England coast to find them. For three or four days, they raced their pursuers out into the open sea, daring to anchor only at night along the fishing banks. To make matters worse, the weather had turned stormy, and the waves crashing around their yacht threw them out of their bunk at night. Anne confessed that it wasn’t terribly comfortable, but she did not succumb to seasickness.
¹³

After several days, Charles managed to outrun the press. Free again to move at leisure, they meandered through the small islands off the coast of Maine and then set out for home. Retracing their path down the New England coast, they arrived in New York—tanned, rested, and resigned to the demands of their adoring public.

After checking into the Berkshire Hotel on June 18, Anne wrote to her mother that they would awaken early the next day for their first public appearance together at a Long Island aviation show. She dreaded the ceremony and the mobs and the constant stalking of photographers and reporters. Nonetheless, she was content to do it for Charles.
¹⁴

A week later, having completed business in New York and paid a short visit to Englewood, Anne and Charles set out to inspect and inaugurate the new transcontinental air and rail route for TAT airlines, for which Charles was a technical adviser. In an open Curtis-Falcon biplane, they flew across four states in three days—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana—through rain and a thick fog that brought “cold terror” to Anne. When they stopped to inspect the transfer station at Columbus, Ohio, Anne was struck by the homage paid to Charles. Always an observer, but never so close, she had not understood that Charles was treated like a king. Teasingly referring to him as Charlemagne, she wrote to her mother that no one could bend too deep or fawn too much in his presence.

When they were alone, however, the thrill of flying was unimaginable. The beauty of flying two thousand feet above the hills of Pennsylvania and the lush farmlands of Ohio catapulted her into a wonderland, where nothing made sense and everything was possible.

As she slipped into the rhythm of flight, her eyes became a lens through which, perhaps for the first time, the metaphysics of flight were defined by a woman. Anne wrote narratives in her head, later putting them on paper in her letters home. She compared the swirl of clouds and the prisms of light to religious visions, and described the configurations of sea and land with the breathless excitement of a child. Her lack of scientific knowledge and her aesthetic perception infused her experience with poignancy and innocence, transforming description into poetry. Anne recorded her vision, from eight thousand feet, of their arrival in St. Louis. In the half-light of a darkened night, she watched the Missouri and Mississippi converge. The two great rivers “joined, broad, peaceful and gleaming, between the dark shores.”
¹⁵

The press followed their voyage closely, referring to Anne alternately as “bride” and “passenger.” She, in fact, was beginning to feel like a partner to Charles—unequal, certainly, but nonetheless a protégée, capable of learning anything he could teach. Merely being with him made her confident; when he was behind her, she stood straight
and tall. Alone for hours on long-distance flights, they passed notes to each other, playing like schoolchildren on summer holiday.

From St. Louis they flew west to Kansas City on July 1, to Wichita two days later, and then on to Albuquerque and Winslow in New Mexico.

“It was an education in America,” Anne later said. She had read Willa Cather and books about the plains, but there was an excitement about seeing the West firsthand that was beyond her expectation. The rich, fertile farmland sprawled beneath her, and she marveled at the tiny houses clustered beside the winding lattice of railroad tracks and at the rivers that cut like silver streaks through the prairies and farmlands. Charles loved the expanse of space; Anne was just as interested in the people. The crowds that greeted them each night when they landed were “funny” and strange, like none she had ever known.
¹⁶

For the first time, Anne could see herself in a broad social context. Her education and upbringing had made her different from the women she met in the small towns—aware, curious, intellectual, and ambitious. She had little patience for uneducated women, she wrote home.
¹⁷
Furthermore, she noted with a touch of self-consciousness, the average man, educated or not, was more interesting than any woman.

But there was a type of woman who earned her complete admiration, embodied for the moment in Mrs. Bixby, the wife of the St. Louis banker who had backed Charles’s flight. Mrs. Bixby was educated, well-groomed, sensitive, and interesting. Whole and self-contained, she was still dedicated to home and family, content in her self-created world. She treated herself with grace and generosity—with the kind of energy one usually reserved for others. Anne was certain this was the key to happiness.
¹⁸

On July 6, the Lindberghs completed their flight, making a “perfect landing” at the Glendale Airfield outside Los Angeles. They were cheered by thousands and greeted by aviation and public officials; then they posed for photographers and motion picture cameras. Escorted to the TAT terminal, Lindbergh pressed a button that signaled sixteen passengers in New York’s Pennsylvania Station to board a train on the first leg of their westward journey. They were to disembark at
Columbus, Ohio, where they would transfer to a plane for the flight over the Mississippi Valley to Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka they would board a Santa Fe coach for an overnight trip to Clovis, New Mexico. From there, at a pace thought miraculous, they would fly to Los Angeles the next day, arriving within forty-eight hours of their departure. For the inaugural flight, Charles would pilot an eastbound flight to Waynoka, where he would turn around and pilot the westward flight back to Los Angeles. On the flight west, Amelia Earhart and Will Rogers were to be among his passengers.

Anne was amazed at the luxuries of the commuter TAT flight. Unlike Charles’s plane, the fuselage was decorated like a Pullman car, with lush leather seats, window curtains, and lamps.
¹⁹
The passengers were even served a mid-morning snack, and in addition to lunch, a proper tea. They were shuttled from plane to train by specially designed automobiles, and were given rest rooms to wash and change.
²⁰

Anne, feeling self-conscious among the movie stars and celebrities who gathered for the inaugural, watched as Mary Pickford cracked a bottle of champagne over the nose of the plane. Anne was given an enormous bunch of yellow roses, but when the photographers were about to snap the picture, Miss Pickford took the roses, and Anne assumed the role of dutiful observer.

The pressure of public life was beginning to take its toll. The strain of avoiding questions, quickly and politely, was like “fencing,” she wrote home. Although Charles managed quite easily, Anne became mired in the social amenities of the exchange. In desperation, she confided to her sister Con, she would foil them all by adopting a “Bright-Insane Smile.”
²¹

Even with the game mastered and the job done, Anne was lonely. Locked out of the airline meetings that Charles attended day and night, she felt useless and disconnected. This was Charles’s life, not hers; home and family were more substantive and real, even at a distance. Anne wondered whether the price she was paying for her marriage was too high. She was frightened by the realization of her dependency on Charles, his needs, and his unpredictable schedule. The letters from her
family were like a protective shield she carried with her as she moved from place to place and meeting to meeting.

But away from the formalities of public life, driving alone through the pastures and farmlands of the California countryside, they were enveloped in their own private world. There was a “golden bloom” over everything. “Maybe it’s just the way we feel, C. and I, when we get off together, alone—all gold”
²²

They flew over places never before seen from the air, inaccessible to archaeologists without months of travel on horseback or by foot. Their jaunt across the Yucatán peninsula more than a year earlier had earned them a high reputation as aerial photographers. Now, on their flight back from the West Coast, Anne and Charles photographed Native American ruins that predated Coronado in the painted deserts of New Mexico.

For Anne, the highlight of the return trip was their stopovers in Cleveland and in Detroit to see their families. The visit to Grandma Cutter in Cleveland was like returning home, and the one in Detroit permitted her to see a new aspect of Charles. He was playful and spoiled among his family, and she joined in the game, treating him like a pampered child. The contrast made her own childhood seem long ago, stolen prematurely and without warning.

During a detour to Englewood, Anne confronted the razing of the house on Palisade Avenue, the home in which she had spent her childhood. The emptiness was terrifying, as though someone close to her had died. Her childhood, so rich with feelings and memories, had simply “vanished.”
²³

The shock of that loss Anne carried with her, even as she and Charles headed south to Washington, D.C., and to President Hoover’s mountain retreat in Virginia. Amid the ceremonial necessities of a visit with the president, Anne saw only the poignancy of ordinary life. Reality, she wrote home, belonged not to the president or to celebrated fliers, but to the illiterate, impoverished, Bible-loving mountaineers, in tune with one another and with the beauty of the land. Their knowledge was clear, deep, and ineffable, untainted by pretense or convention.
²⁴

To Betty, Anne exuded a new confidence—bright, lovely and radiant.
²⁵
Flying, it seemed, suited her well. She had already passed her physical exam, and was preparing for her student pilot’s license.

In fact, Charles was tutoring Anne daily at the Aviation Club on Long Island. Each morning they made the long trek from Englewood to Hicksville, where they arrived at eight-thirty to make practice runs. In a dual control plane, with Charles behind her, Anne would take off, circle several hundred feet above the field, and land. After each landing, with Anne still at the controls, Charles would discuss her flight. At times Anne’s lessons were cut short because reporters in planes flew dangerously close, hanging out the windows to take her photograph.
²⁶

On August 24, having given her nine hours of instruction, Charles judged Anne ready for a solo flight. After several runs and a few words of caution, he sent her off alone. Anne climbed into the cockpit and took off across the field, gaining speed rapidly. As the plane rose, she pulled back the throttle, circling until she gained an altitude of five hundred feet, and then landed. She tried this again; on the third round, she stayed aloft longer, circling several minutes above the field. Obviously pleased, Charles sat on the porch of the clubhouse and read the newspaper, glancing, every few seconds, at the sky.
²⁷
When they arrived in Englewood, Charles was flushed with pride for Anne.
²⁸

Charles was pleased. Anne was coming along well, in spite of her fears and fits of homesickness. And she was as quick and as sharp as he had hoped. Eager to please him and to earn his approval, she was a sturdy and disciplined crewman. But she touched him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Charles had been lonelier than he knew.
²⁹
Now, Anne’s presence in the back cockpit, within the touch of his hand and the call of his voice, filled the long, empty hours of flying. With training and experience, Anne would be able to co-pilot Charles’s plane, and he was becoming more ambitious. He planned to extend his mail route and survey tours, and to make the long-delayed flight to Asia.