Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (55 page)

Walter Winchell, a New York journalist and radio broadcaster, quipped that the boys in Berlin must have been out playing baseball while the Nazis moved in.
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In point of fact, it was golf and squash. Within the elegant American Embassy, the Wilsons and the Smiths and their entourage dined in splendor with their German guests. A meeting in the morning, a game at the club in the afternoon, a house filled with servants—the sinecure of serving in the Nazi Reich was not at all unpleasant, and the Truman Smiths, as well as the Wilsons, found it painful to leave. When Wilson was recalled to Washington, in the spring of 1939, he left his wife at the embassy in the hope of his swift return.
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“We do not love, we do not hate, we do not judge, we do not condemn,” Wilson later said. “We observe, we reflect, we report.”
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Kay and Truman Smith echoed his claim when they were called home. “We did not look either right or left,” Kay Smith said. “We were just there to do our job.”
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As Roosevelt’s cabinet denounced Charles as an American unworthy of his birthright, Anne moved in the rhythms of French society, though she was hungry for home.

For Anne, Elisabeth was a symbol of “home,” and she again read Elisabeth’s letters, in search of “another age and a more golden one.”
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When she later wrote the poem “The Little Mermaid,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story, she was composing a lament for the loss of
childhood, family, and home—the exchange of innocence for moral doubt.
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Roosevelt now had little doubt that America would have to go to war. After the events of late 1938, he began to make his position clear, and called for a re-evaluation of the U.S. neutrality laws and a dramatic increase in the defense budget. On January 4, he said, “We have learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.”
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Anne felt like it was the end of the Roman Empire—not knowing what was coming, “waiting for the storm.”
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Charles, however, was more certain than ever that eugenics was the answer to the degeneration of Western civilization.
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On January 16, he returned to Berlin, ostensibly to procure engines for French aircraft. He talked to Air Minister Milch, who demanded to know what Lindbergh had said in London before the Munich conference. Apparently he was satisfied with Charles’s answer and agreed to send engines to France.
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His words, however, were as hollow as always. The Germans never intended to keep their promise. Once again, Charles had overestimated his power. He thought, to the Germans’ satisfaction, that the force of his personality would deflect France and Germany from their collision course. Hitler was even then planning to invade Poland on his way to France.
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Charles returned to Paris, and Anne rejoiced. She was only alive when he was home.
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She was proud that he had stood up for himself in the face of all the bad publicity.

At just this time, Goering accelerated the “evacuation” of the Jews, Mussolini renewed his support of Franco and the Spanish Nationalists, and France and Britain reaffirmed their alliance.
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While Charles believed the lessons they had learned while living in Europe would prove invaluable, Anne felt they “had exiled them forever.” She would never see America the same way again.
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In the salons of Paris, they were greeted by an aristocracy steeped in
delusion. To Anne, everyone looked like “the Queen in
Alice in Wonderland”
or, scarier yet, “Mary Queen of Scots.” She found that her anger at public derision had given her new courage. After being so shy and reticent, she was able to talk to anyone.
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In February 1939, at a dinner at the American Embassy, Anne was approached by the Duke of Windsor. When he left England after abdicating so that he could marry Wallis Simpson, Edward roamed the salons of Europe. Like Charles, he was criticized by the press for his visits to Germany and his friendships within the Reich. Attracted by the rigor and vitality of the Reich, he, too, threw his support to the Nazis. It was later said that Hitler had promised to return Edward to his throne once Germany had conquered England.
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Anne spoke to the duke of their rootless life and of her fear of going home; he nodded in commiseration. They agreed that Germany was the best hope for the average worker and that the country was an important force, whether or not one agreed with its policies. As she had in London, Anne saw Edward as a kindred spirit, a sensitive man forced to conform to a public image. Soon the duchess and Charles joined the conversation. Drawn together by their isolation, the four exiles stood in the center of the room. They were “like a people in a foreign land who suddenly realize they speak the same language … A pair of unicorns meets a pair of unicorns,” Anne wrote.
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As the press raged at Hitler, and Britain and France readied their troops, Anne’s anger at Charles began to surface. She mourned her misspent youth and the time lost to Charles when she denied her own worth and directed her life and energy to his ends. And yet she tried to silence her doubts, to convince herself that her struggle for internal harmony was over. No longer would she dwell in “divided selves.”
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But she was more confused than ever; like Anne the narrator in
Listen! The Wind
, she was trying to summon up moral courage. As if her life were imitating her art, Anne again adopted an attitude of helplessness.

At the end of January, Anne and Charles visited the Astors. On their way to Cliveden, passing through the drab suburbs of the working
classes, Anne delighted once more in the beauty of the Astors’ home.
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Yet her new way of thinking cast a pall on both their wealth and their politics. Their self-conscious aristocratic behavior and their phalanx of servants seemed absurd. And this time there was a self-congratulatory manner that Anne had not seen before. Neville Chamberlain arrived, with a shy young “niece” who reminded Anne of her former self.
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All at once, her detachment shattered, sending her crying into Lady Astor’s arms. In spite of her distortions, Nancy seemed to Anne beautiful, courageous, and confident. She reminded her of Elisabeth, a feminine ideal to which Anne could only aspire. She realized how much she missed her sister and the depth of her loneliness.
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With introductions from the Astors, they visited London salons where talk of books, poetry, social philosophy, and art distracted them from the news of impending war.
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But the more their reputations were tarnished, the more Charles clung to his ideal “images.” In November, Charles had commissioned the French sculptor Charles Despiau to make a bust of Anne, and the New York designer and artist Jo Davidson to make a figure of himself.
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But somewhere inside, Anne wondered whether it was a golden calf. By year’s end, she was overwhelmed by a deep and heavy depression.

Anne blamed herself for a winter without purpose or accomplishment.
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As had happened after Charlie’s kidnapping, her unexpressed rage toward Charles made it impossible for her to write. Moreover, she could not conceive another child. With Carrel and Charles pushing her to perform her sacred role, Anne accepted her infertility as the final confirmation of her worthlessness.

On March 14, Chamberlain and Daladier renounced their commitment to protect the Czech border. Their agreement did not apply, they reasoned, since Czechoslovakia had not been attacked.
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In Prague, George F. Kennan, stationed at the American Embassy, saw crowds of people weeping in the darkened streets at the “death knoll of their independence.”
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Privately, Anne, too, condemned the Nazis. “All the Edens and Hulls are right. I can’t bear it.”
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When Roosevelt sought assurance from Mussolini that Germany
and Italy would not “attack or invade,” Hitler and Mussolini called his appeal “absurd.”
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Anne remained in Paris while Charles took a ship to New York on business on April 14.
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As the
Aquitania
sailed into port, the Carrels and Jim Newton rode the tugs to greet him. Embittered by events that had made them pariahs in their own land, Dr. Carrel and Lindbergh commiserated in Lindbergh’s cabin aboard the ship while James Newton stood guard at the closed door.

As luck would have it, the arrival was the night of the photographers’ annual ball. On hearing of Lindbergh’s return, the conductor stopped the music, and the men, cameras in hand, rushed to meet the
Aquitania
. Stampeding on board, they hammered on Lindbergh’s door. When he refused to open it, one photographer broke into the adjoining cabin, took photos, and fled.

Charles walked down the plank of the ship, swarmed by reporters shooting hundreds of flashbulbs into the air. “It takes the sweetness from the freedom of democracy,” he thought as he scuttled across the broken glass.
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A
nne, Jon, and Land arrive in New York, April 1939
.

(Sygma)

T
wo weeks later, Anne awoke to the brightening sky as the
Champlain
paddled softly up the Hudson River toward the West Side piers. The April air still held its chill, and rain tapped the deserted deck outside her cabin. The quiet breathing of her young sons was muffled by the sound of reporters gathering outside her door. She wondered whether “coming home” was not just another plunge into the
nightmare she had left two years earlier. She hurried the children into their clothes, pulled their hats down over their eyes, and handed Land to his nurse. Dressed in black, as if in mourning, she grabbed Jon’s hand and told the others to follow her. They all ran breathlessly down the gangplank and out to the waiting limousine. As police sirens carved a path through the moving traffic, Anne’s car rumbled across the George Washington Bridge and turned northward to Englewood. Her mother and Margot were waiting at the door.
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