Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
Indeed, there was the smell of execution in the air. The spectators turned their gaze from Lindbergh to Hauptmann as they listened to the opening words of the Attorney General for the State of New Jersey, David T. Wilentz. Although he was an experienced prosecutor, he had never before tried a criminal case, but he had appointed himself to the task of representing the state when Hunterdon County could not afford to support the case.
A Russian-born Orthodox Jew who had been brought to America at the age of one, Wilentz had made his way up the legal and political hierarchy by his precise and scholarly mind. The thirty-eight-year-old father of three, small and wiry, with dark penetrating eyes and slicked-back hair, dressed in stylish, double-breasted suits, a white felt hat, and a Chesterfield coat.
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But his air of restraint turned electric on the floor of the courtroom as he paced among the desks and chairs, sitting, standing, waving his hands, and modulating the tone and power of his voice to tell his story. Choosing his words with a storyteller’s flair, he addressed the jury of housewives, farmers, and laborers, taking them through the ten-week ordeal, conjuring up images of violence, shock, betrayal, and grief.
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Hinging his case on murder committed in the act of felony,
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Wilentz told the jury that the state would prove that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a cold-blooded killer who, acting alone, had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby for the sole purpose of extorting money.
Edward J. Reilly, the attorney for the defense, was so moved by Wilentz’s opening speech that he called it an “inflammatory summation” and asked that the case be dismissed as a mistrial. The judge denied the request. Reilly was Hauptmann’s second lawyer,
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hired by Anna when the Hearst newspapers offered to pay a retainer of $25,000 in exchange for exclusive interview rights to the
New York Journal.
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At the height of his career, Reilly had been known as one of the most successful
trial attorneys in New York City. Shrewd, skillful, and disarming, he had defended difficult cases—from bootleggers to female killers—two thousand in all, earning him the reputation of “the bull of Brooklyn.” Now fifty-two years old, with a florid face from years of drinking, he was slow and plodding in comparison with the ubiquitous Mr. Wilentz. His courtroom demeanor had become erratic and his flamboyance had turned to eccentricity. Dressed in a black morning coat, striped pants, and spats, as though he were a groom at a brideless wedding, he shifted his eyes behind heavy-rimmed glasses and moved his hands in sweeping gestures. Using his low and resonant voice like a finely tuned instrument, he carefully formed his words. From the beginning, his self-conscious wit had tried the patience of the judge, who saw himself as a paternal figure, protecting the reputations and lives of all those within his courtroom.
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Thomas W. Trenchard was an experienced trial judge with a reputation for fairness. While some criticized his slow and deliberate manner and his liberal interpretation of his role, none questioned his integrity. After twenty-eight years on the bench, the seventy-one-year-old judge was known as a principled and compassionate man whose belief in the American court system and the inalienable rights of the accused had translated into a record rarely achieved. He had never ruled on a capital offense that was reversed on appeal.
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Anne and Charles were among the first to be called. As Anne rose to take her place on the witness stand on the morning of January 3, all sound and gesture ceased. The moment, one journalist wrote, hung in suspense so painful that one could not fail to register the gentle quality of her presence.
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Unused to the rhythms of the court, Anne sat down too soon and was asked to rise to take the oath. She was dressed in a blue silk suit and a black satin beret, and sat tall and straight, her legs crossed and her eyes riveted on Wilentz’s face. In a measured voice, formulating her responses with care, Anne followed Wilentz and told the story from the arrival of Betty Gow, on March 1, at the Hopewell estate, to the discovery of her baby’s body ten weeks later. Without evidence of emotion, she examined each of her baby’s sleeping garments,
confirming their authenticity as those he had worn on the night of the kidnapping. Satisfied, Wilentz turned his witness over to the defense. As the court watched Reilly rise, no one could have anticipated the compassion of his words.
“The defense feels,” he said softly, “that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh needs no examination.” Anne glanced gratefully at Reilly and then nearly leaped up from her chair.
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Charles was next. With a formality that almost smacked of the absurd, Wilentz opened with two simple questions.
“Are you the husband of the lady who was just in the stand?”
“I am,” Charles said.
“What is your occupation?”
“My occupation is aviation.”
Wilentz then led him into a moment-by-moment narrative, replete with charts and documents of the sequence of events from his arrival for dinner on the night of March 1, through the ransom exchange in the Bronx cemetery, to the identification of his child at the morgue in Trenton. For several hours, Charles answered Wilentz’s questions in a precise and careful manner, noting exact times, dates, and places. To those unfamiliar with the case, Charles’s narrative was a seamless story. But Reilly knew there were issues that Wilentz had deliberately left un-addressed.
Once Reilly took the floor, there were no holds barred. Moving back and forth in time, dealing with personalities and theories rather than facts, Reilly hacked away at Charles’s composure, challenging both his memory and his judgment, forcing him to admit investigative possibilities that had gone unexplored: Charles’s refusal to have lie-detector tests given to the Morrow and Lindbergh servants or to permit probes of their personal and professional backgrounds; his refusal to cooperate with the police except on his own terms, making unilateral decisions at key points in the investigation. Furthermore, the investigation was hindered by the dissension among the police agencies; the mishandling of the evidence at the scene of the crime; Condon’s unusual role in the ransom
exchange and possible complicity in the execution of the crime; and Charles’s espousal of John Hughes Curtis’s gang theory.
Pressed to articulate the reasons for his unconventional course of action, Charles stated that once the Condon-kidnapper liaison had been established, he decided “the events would probably be peculiar, not according to the ordinary logic of life.”
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True to his reputation, without documents, facts, or substance, Reilly had exposed Charles as controlling and unreasonable. While all unexplored channels would remain in the realm of theory, it was clear that Anna Hauptmann had hired a masterly lawyer.
If Reilly had punctured Charles’s persona, Anne had not noticed. Overwhelmed by the trauma of recounting the kidnapping of her child in a public forum, she left the courtroom, intending not to return. Charles, however, went every day, with a .38–caliber pistol strapped to his chest, in the company of his brother-in-law, Aubrey Morgan.
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Sequestered at the Morrow home, Anne knew of the trial only what she viewed through her husband’s mind.
For the moment, however, the trial had set her free. Finally, she believed, justice would be done. For the first time since Charlie’s death, Anne stopped running, allowing her thoughts and her grief to come to the surface. Over and over she dreamed of Elisabeth, permitting herself to feel the loss. The Elisabeth of her dreams carried Anne through “strange temples” and long dark hallways. But one dream had an unexpected twist: Elisabeth was tired and upset, and Anne was beginning to feel like a burden. They went through a door into a large, enclosed piazza, and Anne sat down to read a magazine. Suddenly their roles were reversed; Anne was carrying Elisabeth, who sobbed and clung and demanded her comfort.
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Words were the key—Anne reflected when she awoke—not those written in the privacy of her diary, but in the open piazza, the public square. Only then could she stand on her own and carry the weight of Elisabeth’s legacy.
Harold Nicolson, who was to write Dwight’s biography, had become
the unexpected midwife to Anne’s work. He saw her as a gentle and sensitive young woman caught in a bizarre and punitive drama, and he labored daily to gain her trust. It was he, in fact, who had read her magazine article about her transatlantic flight and who made sure to let her know he thought it “excellent.” Charles was too close to the experience and too invested in her work to be anything but critical; Nicolson, however, gave her hope that her slow “illogical mind” could understand aspects of life worth recording. The baby was dead, but she was alive, and she did not want her writing to be “crushed … smothered … hurt.” If she couldn’t write, “someone should kill this thing in me … [and] send me back to children.”
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While Anne built barricades against the trial, the public knew no bounds, and those who strutted upon its stage moved with a heightened sense of drama. After the Lindberghs and their servants had been heard, those who professed to have seen Hauptmann took the stand, and Reilly gave the public the show it desired. The prosecution gathered circumstantial evidence, and the defense had nothing but theory. Witness after witness came to the stand, pointed at Richard Hauptmann, and became subject to Reilly’s attempt to cast doubt on their credibility. His tactic was to belittle their character and to jar their memory, building suspicion in each juror’s mind. Although he often lost the game, he played his hand well. He managed to make Hochmuth, the eighty-one-year-old neighbor of the Lindberghs who claimed to have seen the murderer on the day of the crime, look like a half-blind, incompetent meddler; he managed to undermine the reliability of Perrone, the taxi driver who had acted as the liaison between Cemetery John and Dr. Condon.
But Condon was a fierce opponent, one who could chase Reilly around the ring. The
New York Times
did not need a dramatist to describe the courtroom scene. Condon was the protagonist, the playwright, and the director. And there was justice in his tone of authority. Lindbergh had taken a ride, heard a voice, and paid a fee; it was Condon who had made a pact with the devil. But if he was the biggest star among the witnesses, he was also the prime target for the defense. While he and Wilentz smoothly walked through the ten-week sequence of events between
the crime and the discovery of the baby’s body, Condon and Reilly vied for the attention of the court. Recognizing Condon’s narcissism, Reilly flattered his keen powers of observation and admired the quality of his physical prowess—and managed to press Condon against the ropes. But, to the delight of the spectators, not for long.
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As the contenders battled in public, Anne wrestled with her inner voices and sought comfort from her friends. Corliss Lamont, the gentle and philosophical son of the Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, had come to commiserate with her during the trial. To Anne’s surprise, they discussed Elisabeth, love, and “a woman’s place.” She delighted in the generosity of Corliss’s mind, grateful not only for his understanding but for his acceptance of who she was. What a relief, she wrote in her diary, that he didn’t try to change her. “Why can’t one keep that admirable distance when one is married, that respect for another person’s solitude?”
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Her Englewood friend Thelma Crawford Lee tried to encourage her,
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but it was Con’s friend Margot Loines who drew Anne into the nourishing universe of ideas. An aspiring actress, Margot radiated
a joie de vivre
and moved with grace, precision, and femininity. Anne was quick to recognize the rare confluence of intellect, sensitivity, and strength. A Theosophist, Margot meshed Hindu sacred writings with Protestant ethics, challenging the duality of Christian virtue and sin. She taught Anne to seek, through meditation, a spiritual reality beyond her senses. She celebrated the human mind, validating its wickedness as well as its divinity. Anne later said that Theosophy satisfied her “hunger” to accept the “evil” within herself and in others.
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Charles worried that he was losing control of Anne. He believed Anne’s dependence on her friends and her diary was a threat to their relationship. For the first time, Anne had secrets. When Anne wanted to meet Con in Boston for a show, Charles balked, insisting it was “disrespectful” to the trial. But there was an inconsistency to his thinking, Anne wrote. “C. so rarely cares about appearance.” Still, Anne did as he said, even though her decision to stay home made her feel like a caged animal, imprisoned in a life she hadn’t created and was powerless to change.
The trial had allowed the public eye to pierce the walls of her home, affecting even her movements among family. She had feared impropriety, but now there was a greater danger. She was afraid that her rebellious anger toward Charles would make every act, every thought, every dream, every emotion, seem to him an act of betrayal. She wrote:
I must not talk. I must not cry. I must not write—I must not think—I must not dream. I must control my mind—I must control my body—I must control my emotions … But last night, lying in bed … trying to be like a stone … I felt I could understand insanity and physical violence … anything.
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Unable to sleep, Anne took long walks around the estate, seeing figures in the patterns of trees and snow, and reciting poetry. Her struggle with her thoughts seemed to work; she found the courage to write. She wished her writing could rise to the standards of Harold Nicolson’s. She found the first five chapters of his biography of her father an astute and “charming” analysis. He had captured her father well, and, with him, her memories of Elisabeth. She confided to her mother about her book and revealed her grief about her father and Elisabeth. Finally, Anne wrote triumphantly in her diary, she was “purged” of herself.
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