Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (22 page)

The press had no inkling of Anne’s pregnancy. Experienced in the art of survival, the Morrows had learned to keep their secrets. There was, though, one secret they could not keep—Dwight Morrow’s political career had taken a new turn. Anne’s marriage to Charles made Dwight the perfect candidate for just about everything. He was appointed to a five-power conference on naval limitation in London at the same time as he was offered the New Jersey Republican Senate seat occupied by Walter E. Edge, who had just been appointed Ambassador to France.
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While it was clear to Morrow he was playing in the big leagues, it was also clear that he had to follow the rules.

Morrow was recognized as a shrewd negotiator and gifted diplomat; now his image was enhanced by the Lindbergh name. The mere sound of it was like an elixir to an electorate still mourning the loss of thousands of men in the war fought little more than a decade earlier. With his son-in-law at his side, Morrow could woo voters from a platform beyond party affiliation: “Peace through progress.”

Although Dwight was flattered, he had a measure of contempt for political machinations, and Betty noted that he felt “forced” and “tricked” at having to make a fast decision at a long distance. He did not know that his friend Joseph Frelinghuysen was also a candidate for Ambassador Edge’s seat.
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Betty, aware of her husband’s indecision, recruited her friends George Rublee and Reuben Clark, at the embassy, to encourage Dwight to accept the Senate post. And when he did, she was overjoyed. This was the life she had hoped for. The appointment
was surely just the beginning; there were already rumbles of a presidential draft for 1936.
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As Betty packed their bags to leave Cuernavaca, she was suddenly overwhelmed by Mexico’s beauty—its white mountains against an azure sky, the pristine water, the sun-soaked countryside. Nothing, though, could compare with the thought of being home in Englewood with Anne.
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But to Betty’s disappointment, Anne did not plan to stay. Pregnant or not, she was expected to fly. Charles had commitments he wanted to keep and still harbored hopes of an Asian flight. Anne, on the other hand, wanted to find a home, a farmhouse in Connecticut or on Long Island. She would live anywhere, she wrote to her mother, just to feel self-sufficient.
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Once again, Christmas overtook the Morrows. The decoration of the tree, the poinsettias in the halls, the fires burning from room to room, embraced them in a familiar island of consolation. For the Morrows, Christmas held the promise of salvation, illuminating and sanctifying their daily lives. But Christmas at home was a luxury that Anne did not dare to savor. Nauseated in her early pregnancy, Anne reluctantly planned her flights with Charles. They would bring in the New Year with an inspection tour of the TAT lines, and, after flying to Columbus and Indianapolis, would arrive in St. Louis on New Year’s Eve.

Determined not to let go of home, Anne tried to bring it with her. She memorized poetry at night so that she could amuse herself during the long hours of flying. She categorized the poems according to the emotions they evoked, regretting that few permitted her either joy or sorrow. To her, most of them were either pleasant or melancholy. Only Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beaumont, and Shakespeare could bring the pure distilled sounds that satisfied her. She consoled herself and her mother with letters, but they rippled with a sense of loss. Anne did take pleasure in seeing Charles happy, yet she felt uprooted, caught in a way of life that was not her own.

She wrote to her sister Con on January 14, from Los Angeles, that the
California rain was cold and penetrating, all the more painful because it was unexpected. Snuggled between a desk and a radiator, she wrote an ode to a New England spring, exploding with color, energy, and light. Imagining the beauty of Next Day Hill with its red fires burning and its gushing white blooms, Anne washed away the gray winter sky. The room itself became her garden, radiant with flowers everywhere.
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While flying brought mastery to the level of art, Anne still let her fears overtake her. Unable to share them with Charles or with her family, Anne found a willing listener in Charles’s mother. When two TAT passenger planes crashed, killing everyone aboard, Anne, now in her third month of pregnancy, railed against the senseless loss of life. There had been no defects in the plane, and the weather report had been clear and favorable, yet sixteen lives had hung on the judgment of a single pilot. Would Charles be up to the task, she wondered in her letters to Evangeline? Would Charles know when to turn back? Perhaps they were deluding themselves; they might be the next to go down.

She apologized to Evangeline for her frailty. Like Charles, she equated strength with reason, having learned her parents’ lessons well. Feelings sapped courage and resolve. Reason was at the crux of duty and virtue; everything else was self-indulgence. Determined not to succumb to her fears, Anne cultivated the manner of confidence, challenging herself to fly.

By the end of January, with relentless coaching from Charles, Anne had mastered the Lockheed biplane and anxiously awaited the delivery of Charles’s new low-winged Speedster. Her real triumph was yet to come.

Convinced that motorless flight—fast, cheap, and accessible—would be a spark for popular interest, Charles learned how to glide. With the help of Hawley Bowlus, a record-breaking pilot, Charles taught Anne, who delighted in the ease with which she learned and in the grace and beauty of the glider as it sailed. She wrote to her family that the plane was first towed across a field by a car; then, as the car went faster, it pulled the glider up into the air. When the rope was cut, the plane, like a kite, rode the air currents.

After several practice runs, Charles encouraged Anne to take the glider pilot’s test. The day before her flight, he chose the ideal place—the Soledad Mountains, the highest peaks in San Diego. No one had ever sailed from them before, but Charles was convinced that the thermal lifts would raise Anne’s plane to a steady soar.

Anne, less certain, climbed reluctantly to the peak of the mountain. But once she saw the glider “perched” at the edge of the cliff, Anne felt comfortable and confident. As the cameramen poised and the coach yelled commands, Anne was shot like an arrow off a bow, cutting the air and catching the wind.

It was instinct that carried Anne off the cliff—instinct and Charles’s belief that she could do it. Wondering if she was about to be sacrificed to one of Charles’s grand ideals, Anne pretended it was a dream. But when she heard the keel scrape off the side of the mountain, her fears melted into serenity, and she felt in control. Gliding smoothly through the currents, she angled down the mountainside. Then she stopped with barely a warning “like a sled” into crusted snow.
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It was only later, through the eyes of observers, that Anne understood what she had done. As she sailed down into the meadow beside the highway, cars stopped dead in their tracks; people rushed out to see what had fallen from the sky. “She’s all right!” yelled one woman. “This little girl fell all the way down the mountain, and she’s all right.”

Dressed in white duck trousers, a sylph of a woman despite her pregnancy, Anne surmised that she must have looked positively insane.

“But how will you get back up?” the woman asked, scaling the mountain with her eyes.

“Oh, I’m not going up again,” Anne said. “This is where I meant to come.”
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In fact, Anne had maneuvered her ship more than well. She had stayed aloft the required six minutes for a first-class license and became the first woman to qualify as a glider pilot. Her mother was in a frenzy, chastising her daredevil daughter for her dangerous acts. Young women across the country, though, responded by forming girls’ glider clubs, with Anne Lindbergh as a charter member.

The success of her flight dissipated Anne’s ambivalence, and she began earnestly to study the mechanics of flight. The luxury of their new Falcon monoplane, with its isinglass windows and roomy cockpit, made her feel safe and comfortable. Charles had installed a generator to keep them warm, and they brought plenty of food and lined the cockpits with pillows and coats to prevent drafts. Best of all, the isinglass cover did not separate her from Charles. She shouted and poked at him playfully as they flew.

To their adoring public, Anne and Charles were achieving a marital harmony in the air that few achieved in the comfort of home. The press, however, gave little credit to Anne for their success.

The Literary Digest
noted:

In truth, Anne was a willing and able student who needed little more than Charles’s confidence to motivate and sustain her. In preparation for high-altitude flying, she was required to learn sextant navigation. Now the laws of physics that had eluded her as a student at Smith suddenly became crucial to her work as a navigator. With Charles’s help, Anne mastered the theory and mechanics of celestial navigation. Using a sextant to calculate the position of the sun, moon or stars, Anne triangulated their precise position.
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She had forgotten the pleasure of focusing on one task and the joy of working with someone toward a common goal. Six months pregnant, she wrote to her mother that the difficult parts were the extremes of weather, boarding the plane, and climbing back out. But worst of all were her stiff limbs and body aches from sitting too long in a small seat.
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Although she wished for nothing but home, Anne loved the wild
beauty of California, with its cliffs plunging into the sea, and its rocky coast dotted with sandy white beaches.
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Finally, on April 21, after a journey of four months, Anne and Charles set their course for home. Dressed, this time, in their electrically warmed flying suits and fur-lined jumpers and helmets, they flew their custom Lockheed Sirius high-altitude monoplane at 20,000 feet at a speed of 190 miles per hour. Choosing to break the time record rather than to fly low and slowly to conserve fuel, they stopped for gas in Wichita, Kansas. They made the trip from Glendale, California, to Roosevelt Field on Long Island in 14 hours, 45 minutes, and 32 seconds, nearly three hours under the record set the previous June. While Charles played down the value of their flight, the five thousand people who had waited all day and night at the airfield saw the Lindberghs as homecoming heroes.
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When the plane came to a full stop, it was surrounded by the reporters and cameramen, as well as the scores of pilots, who had spent the night in the light-drenched field. Exhausted and nauseated, Anne was embarrassed to step out of the cockpit into the camera lights. But with genuine admiration, the photographers encircling her broke into applause.

One year and thirty thousand miles later, the girl for whom flying had been “cold terror” was greeted by an adoring public and the approbation of her peers. Anne was an equal among aviators and a pioneer of commercial flight. She smiled and waved at the cheering crowd.

She was finally home.

Charles and Anne, Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow in North Haven, Maine, en route to Asia, July 1931
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(UPI/Corbis-Bettmann)