Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (23 page)

O
n Memorial Day 1930, Charles Lindbergh set a new record. He flew the 110 miles from Atlantic City to Newark in forty-five minutes.
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A mere puddle jump in the annals of aviation history, it was nonetheless noted nationwide. Sitting behind him in the cockpit was Dwight Morrow, suddenly the most interesting political figure in the country. Six months after his temporary appointment, Morrow was running in the primary race to retain his Senate seat. In less than an hour, without a word of testimony or endorsement, Lindbergh, his pilot-chauffeur, had clothed Morrow in his aura, teaching him the subtleties of media manipulation.

As he swept down into Newark Metropolitan airport in the same Lockheed Sirius monoplane he and Anne had used on their record-breaking transcontinental flight a month earlier, Lindbergh sheathes Morrow, a symbol of old-fashioned values, in his silver flying machine. He gave Morrow the essence of his popularity—moral stability in a
technological age. It was a generous gift to his ambitious father-in-law, one he might have given his own father had he lived to witness Lindbergh’s fame.

They arrived to the din of fire engines, brass bands, and a huge cheering holiday crowd. As officials greeted them and reporters closed in, Lindbergh made certain he was in full view of the cameras, with Morrow by his side. Morrow, his usual disheveled self, was whisked into a waiting limousine and escorted by police on motorcycles to Krueger Hall, in downtown Newark. There, his head barely rising above the lectern, Morrow delivered an elegant speech on the pivotal issue of the campaign: Prohibition. Stunning his opponents and pleasing the Republican Party, Morrow made a persuasive argument for its repeal, stripping the law of its moral weight and presenting it as an unenforceable rule. He advocated the passage of the Volstead Act, which would grant each state the right to determine its policy toward the traffic of liquor. His challengers, two “dries,” Joseph F. Frelinghuysen, a former senator, and Representative Frank Fort, faded into the background as Morrow staged his “battle of words.”

His opponents called him as idealistic but weak, out of touch with the electorate. The writer Edmund Wilson dubbed him a mechanical, unimpressive little man who promoted old-time religion—faith, confidence, and moral fiber—as an anodyne for complex social and economic problems. He was a puppet, Wilson said, “the gigantic ventriloquial voice … of American capitalism.”
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Apparently the electorate disagreed. Two weeks later, on June 17, Morrow made a landslide, winning the primary by three hundred thousand votes over his opponent, Representative Fort. An anonymous critic summed it up this way: “You might beat Morrow, but you could not beat Morrow and Will Rogers and Anne and Lindy combined.”

Her father’s campaign made Anne nervous. Her pregnancy was constantly in the news. Not only was her husband thrown into the political turmoil; her unborn baby was, as well. Reporters stalked the gates outside Next Day Hill, querying the Lindberghs and Morrows as they
passed and trying to bribe the servants for news. Anne was angry at the press. While she understood her responsibility as a public figure, she and Charles held firm to their decision to give out no information.
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Heightening the tension was a mild heart attack suffered by Elisabeth. Later, it was revealed that she was dangerously ill; the Morrows had been informed by physicians that lesions were forming on the heart muscle and there was nothing they could do.
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Confined to bed, Elisabeth felt helpless, cheated of time and possibility. Nevertheless, she expected to open her Montessori school, as planned, in the first week of October. She and Connie had rented a small Victorian house in Englewood with a white fence around it, a big garden behind with apple trees, horse chestnuts, a mulberry tree, and a pig farm. She named it the Little School because the children were young. Her big dream, however, was coming true: they had enrolled forty children under the age of six.
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With the Morrow and the Lindbergh families under one roof in Englewood, the days passed in a series of personal dramas and crises. Even though she was on “rest-cure,” Elisabeth invited her teaching staff to the house to swim, play tennis, and plan for the fall. Morrow continued at his mad pace, like a man running out of time. Charles, more or less grounded until the baby arrived, made himself busy with household chores, and Anne luxuriated in the simple pleasures of sleep, food, and long walks with their terrier. Now in her ninth month, she succumbed to a state of hazy consciousness, and longed for the slender, vital body she once had had, a body that yielded to her wishes. But as usual, nature was her consolation, reflecting and molding the contours of her mind, giving her faith in the cycle of the seasons. As she walked in the woods surrounding the Morrow home, she savored the sights and sounds of spring, stopping to admire the pure white dogwood. Later, in her poems reminiscent of Rilke, “No Angels” and “Dogwood,” the dogwood tree became a symbol of hope and new life.

But new life, Anne sensed, had a hierarchy of its own, and some forms were more welcome than others. As she entered the last two weeks of pregnancy, she worried that the child might not be a boy, and
confessed her fear in a letter to her mother-in-law. She arranged a code to elude the press. For a girl, the telegram would be “advising accepting terms of contract.” For a boy, it would be “advising purchasing property.” “Advise” and “accepting” each had an A, Anne explained to Evangeline, and the baby would be named Anne. There would be no question of a boy’s name—Charles. Besides the obvious alliteration, one can ponder her allusion to female acceptance and male control, to the ancient laws of kinship and property rights. But beyond the names was the fear itself, the inadequacy symbolized by not producing a male child.

She wondered if Evangeline, for whom a male child had been salvation, would be disappointed and apologized in advance for falling short of expectation. Charles, she noted, seemed blasé about the baby’s sex, but Anne knew a boy would please him.
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When Anne went into labor on Saturday, June 21, the Morrow estate became a fortress. Dr. Everett M. Hawks, associated with the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City, pushed his way through the crowds of reporters who stood at the Morrows’ gate. With him were four specialists and a nurse, Marie Cummings, who had resigned her position as head nurse of the Knickerbocker Hospital for the privilege of assisting at the Lindbergh birth. Present, as well, in addition to the immediate family, was Brigadier General J. J. Morrow, Dwight’s older brother. While the wires buzzed and reporters poised, the Morrow home grew still. Without real information, the reporters fabricated fanciful portraits of the expectant father nervously pacing the rooms of the mansion, seeking little company and comfort from others. It was probably not far from the truth. One imagines Charles solitary and withdrawn as he waited for news of the birth of his child.

At 1:10
P.M.
on Sunday, June 22, Anne gave birth to a baby boy, 7 pounds and 12.8 ounces. It was reported that Lindbergh ate his Sunday dinner and took a dive into the Morrows’ pool. The
Daily News
noted that it “seemed almost an omen, in view of the horoscope predicting the Eaglet will be a waterman rather than an airman.”
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The euphoria, the unqualified joy of the moment, dissipated Anne’s
antipathy toward the press. Reversing her pledge of silence, she sent a message to the reporters outside the gates, informing them that it was a double birthday celebration—the day of her son’s birth was on her twenty-fourth birthday.

As greetings from friends came pouring in, a steady stream of outsiders tried to gain admission to the Morrow home but were turned away by private guards. Within hours, the baby’s birth was front-page news across the nation and the world. The announcement of the Lindbergh birth in the
New York Times
elbowed aside Admiral Byrd’s return from Antarctica, even as he was taking time from his celebration schedule to congratulate Colonel Lindbergh in person. In France, the Lindbergh baby was honored as one of “our own,”
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and four thousand miles away, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “the infant son” was honored by the Kenosha Junior Optimist Club as a member in the highest standing.
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Anne felt “gloriously happy” since her boy had been born. At first she had worried it would look like her, with brown hair and a big nose, but then she noticed that he had Charles’s mouth and chin. Relieved, she felt certain she had satisfied everyone.
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Several days later, the
Times
reported that Anne had filed a birth certificate at the Englewood Department of Health without registering the baby’s name. As if the baby’s birth had eclipsed her own and obliterated her connection with her past, Anne gave her occupation as “flyer” and her city of permanent residence as St. Louis, Missouri.
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In the wake of Morrow’s victory and the baby’s birth, the Lindberghs began to withdraw from the press. Anne and Charles appeared and disappeared at will, and the press soon felt manipulated. Under the guise of public interest, they wanted the news. It wasn’t Lindbergh’s flaws that irked them; it was his persona of perfection. In an article entitled “What’s Wrong with Lindbergh?” John S. Gregory of
Outlook
magazine warned that if Lindbergh persisted in being perfect and “Godlike,” the press, out of sheer boredom, would be forced to fabricate his baser qualities.
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Ironically, the press did not understand the power of its fabrications. The media image of Lindbergh was molding the family’s psychological
reality. The Lindberghs and Morrows began to see one another as idealized personalities; Anne, who sensed the distortion, believed it beyond her control. Dwight Jr. felt the curse of his “presidential” father and his “godlike” brother-in-law, and Elisabeth also struggled with Anne’s portrait of perfection. Since Anne’s marriage and the birth of the baby, the tables had turned. In Elisabeth’s eyes, Anne was the one who had everything. It was her own life that seemed uncertain.

In the days succeeding the birth of Charles Jr., Elisabeth, recuperating in Maine, wrote a letter begging Anne for her understanding and sympathy. Anne was ruffled by her sister’s jealousy; her self-doubt evoked Anne’s guilt. Nonetheless, Anne responded elegantly, portraying the birth of her son as just another milestone Elisabeth could easily match.
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Deferring to Elisabeth as an authority on childrearing, Anne sought her advice in the care of her son. She thought the Montessori method “enlightening” and played with the idea of Watsonian motherhood. John B. Watson, an American psychologist, preached a detached and scientific stance, encouraging mothers to be physically and emotionally removed, scientific and objective, without selfish or neurotic motives.
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Anne joked that she easily fit the ideal. She had no desire to cuddle her baby.
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Throughout the fall, Charles became increasingly restless. He wanted to return to his flying schedule, and he wanted Anne to fly with him. Her rebounding health signaled to him that she was ready. Reluctantly, Anne agreed to hire a nurse to care for the baby while she and Charles traveled. But Marie Cummings, the nurse who had attended the baby’s birth and had promised to stay, now gave word of her wish to leave. She was a hospital nurse used to big-city tumult, and was tired of the crowded house, small-town life, and unpredictable schedule. Elisabeth’s personal maid, Mary Beatties, told a friend, Betty Gow, of an opening on the Lindbergh-Morrow staff and suggested that she ask for an interview.

Betty Gow, dark-eyed and graceful, with a delicate beauty much like Anne’s, was a salesgirl who had quit school at the age of fourteen. She had come from Glasgow, Scotland, in May 1929 to earn her living
as a domestic servant. Since her arrival, she had held five jobs, three of them in Detroit, where she had visited her boyfriend in the hope that he would marry her. When the relationship ended in a quarrel in September 1930, Betty returned to New Jersey as a nursemaid for a local family. On February 23, 1931, Betty Gow was interviewed by Betty Morrow’s secretary, Kathleen Sullivan, and sent up the hill to the Morrow estate. Banks, the butler, who also served as Dwight Morrow’s valet, met her at the door and ushered her upstairs to Anne and Charles, who greeted her on the second-floor landing. The interview, a half-hour in length, was conducted as they stood in the hallway.

To Betty Gow, Charles seemed “nobody special”—not at all like the image drawn by the press. She was struck by his lack of sophistication when he complimented Betty on her English and then, realizing it was her native tongue, turned red with embarrassment. But Betty liked Anne right away.
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Unpretentious, without makeup and fancy clothes, Anne seemed accessible, familiar, and as naïve as Betty herself.

Betty saw herself as a novice servant, untutored in the ways of the educated and rich. In spite of her short stints as nursemaid, she had little knowledge of child care and was, in fact, surprised that the Lindberghs trusted her. When they called the very next morning to engage her services, she was thrilled. Later, Betty came to believe that her naïveté had been her biggest asset. She was gentle and earnest and willing to learn, and the Lindberghs must have sensed that they could train her to fill their idiosyncratic needs. In many ways, it was a perfect match. Not knowing what to expect, Betty expected nothing, and not knowing what to give, the Lindberghs gave nothing. With little time off on a daily or even weekly basis, Betty simply made do, freeing the Lindberghs to follow their peripatetic schedule.