Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (73 page)

On a trip to Paris in 1966, Charles took his usual place in the back of the plane, hiding behind his books and papers. But his long legs, thrust sideways between the seats, needed a stretch, and he walked down the aisle toward the back galley. Adrienne Arnett, a twenty-five-year-old stewardess who had seen him many times before, brushed by in the opposite direction. She was an attractive young woman, blond, buxom, and blue-eyed, distinctive in her jingling laugh and her direct, unabashed manner. Against company rules, Adrienne broke the silence.
¹⁵

“You make me suspicious,” she blurted out. To her surprise, Charles was not offended. He wheeled around, eager to banter, delving, in a teasing way, her apparent curiosity. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she told him that he was a man of “special destiny.” It was no accident that he had flown the Atlantic, she said. His gifts were akin to those of all extraordinary men, no different from Thomas Jefferson’s or Benjamin Franklin’s. Intent on proving that she was more than she appeared to be, she told him that she was a metaphysician with a deep interest in the spiritual aspects of life. Before he left the plane, Charles asked for her address and handed her a copy of “Civilization and
Progress.” There was a book he wanted to send her, he said: Lao-tzu’s
The Way of Life
. It was a new translation of the book Anne had given him twenty years earlier.

For six years, Charles gave Adrienne many books—poetry, philosophy, even the works of Saint-Exupéry—and continued to see her in New York and Paris, London, Hawaii, California, whenever and wherever they happened to be. To Adrienne, he was “a gorgeous hunk of a man,” with piercing blue eyes and a fascinating mind. She was eager to follow his thoughts, to learn what he had to teach.

Adrienne made life disarmingly simple. She cared about his comfort and understood his needs. And he could talk to her, he said, as he could never talk to Anne. Demanding of him no commitment, allowing him to come and go as he pleased, she was content to live in the moment. When they were together, they talked and laughed, sharing easy pleasures—a long walk, a good meal, and perhaps more passion than they cared to admit.

When Charles was with Adrienne, his anger dissipated; he was boyish. And though he was sometimes distant and preoccupied, he was a gentle and attentive friend and companion, much as he had been when he courted Anne. But most of all, Adrienne was not afraid of Charles. When his teasing became abusive or he got out of hand, she did not hesitate to throw him out. He would call the next morning, sheepish and apologetic and strangely grateful. If Charles was the hero with a “special” destiny, he was also a boy with lessons to learn who had found, perhaps for the first time, a female mentor strong enough and willing to teach him.

Anne knew nothing of Charles’s visits with Adrienne.
¹⁶
Slipped into the seams of his scheduled flights, the relationship was invisible except to Charles and Adrienne. But Anne did notice the “emptiness” of the hours. Feeling old and tired and not needed by anyone,
¹⁷
she sought, as she had so many times before, to make sense of her marriage. Deeper than ever, she plunged into her diaries, hoping to find the “patterns” of their lives.

By the end of 1963, Anne and Charles had moved into a small house on the eastern side of their Darien property, built closer to sea level, “tucked among the marsh grasses with the shore birds of the Long Island
Sound.”
¹⁸
Unlike the rambling Tudor in which their family had grown, the house, designed by Charles, was spartan and symmetrical, with stucco walls and teal-blue shutters. Gone were the dark, cavernous rooms, replaced by light-filled spaces and a simple, muted, streamlined décor. The only remnant of Anne’s childhood was her father’s desk from Next Day Hill, piled high with papers and books. They called the house Tellina, the name of a mollusk with a small, delicate body and spindly, powerful legs; it was as if it reflected the new shape of their lives.

By the end of the decade, Charles had become a strong advocate of wildlife preservation and a recipient of several national awards. As he had done in his early pit-stop flights, he canvassed the United States, meeting local leaders and speaking for his cause. Under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, he shifted his attention to the South Pacific, surveying the land and animal populations, lobbying foreign leaders to pass legislation on behalf of conservation.

In 1967, on one of his flights home from the Philippines, Charles stopped to visit a friend, Sam Pryor, at his ocean-front estate on the eastern shore of Maui, in Hawaii. Sam’s uncle had been the president of the St. Louis bank that backed Charles in his 1927 flight, and he had known Sam since his early days at Pan Am. A man who could deftly handle the press, Sam had been “Trippe’s man on the Hill,” his liaison with government officials. He was a gregarious, hard-driving, salt-of-the-earth man in spite of his wealth, and he was given to hero-worship.
¹⁹
Charles understood Sam, and they enjoyed their shared commitment to the land and animals, as well as a spontaneous “little boy” sense of adventure. Sam was among the few who could match Charles’s physical endurance and thirst for exploration. They had cultivated their relationship through the years, first at Pan Am, then as anti-Roosevelt men before the war, and also as neighbors in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In 1963, Sam and his wife, Tay, had purchased a hundred acres in Kipahulu, eleven miles outside the town of Hana. Their estate was a garden and a sanctuary, filled with flowers, shrubs, and trees, and home to Sam’s menagerie of pet gibbons.

From the moment Charles’s plane skimmed the surface of the island,
he was taken by the line and color of its beauty. Its mountains sloped down to flat horizons, lush green terrain, and deep-dimpled craters of volcanic ash. Orange cliffs descended to black beaches washed by the deep blue sea. At early dawn, Charles would stand on Sam’s beach to watch the sun rise. He would swim beyond the surf to the coral reefs, among the waving fronds and the brilliantly colored fish. But to his disappointment, the primitive ways of the native people had almost disappeared. European culture had eroded Hawaii’s Polynesian past, and it had succumbed to the “modern.”

Nonetheless, Charles believed it a perfect home base, developed and populated enough for Anne, yet accessible to him in his conservation work both east and west. In 1968, he had a house built on five acres of ocean-front land, transferred to his ownership through the generosity of Sam. The house was designed to buffet the ocean wind and rain, and its geometric lines married simplicity with technological precision. As if Charles wanted to touch the primitive within the refuge of impenetrable walls, he had the house constructed of three-foot-thick stone, its surfaces covered with granite tile. Built without Anne’s consent, according to Charles’s needs, the house, appropriately named Argonauta, never felt like home to Anne. It was cold and unforgiving, without the comfort of heat or electricity. Forced to cook and write by gaslight, eleven miles out of town, and thousands of miles away from family and friends, Anne was almost always alone. She used to stand on the cliffs above the shore and hold her ears against the deafening roar.

Preferring the sound of cowbells and the softness of mountain mist, Anne often retreated to her chalet in Switzerland. While Charles surveyed the rainforests of the Philippines, Anne sat in Vevey on her verandah, watching the cloud-hung mountains in the distance and working on her diaries and letters. Helen Wolff, in Locarno, read her manuscripts line by line. Since Kurt’s death, Anne and Helen had become intimate friends; Anne trusted her literary instincts and her judgment. Her goal, Helen wrote to Anne, was to retain the honesty of her view while maintaining her professional objectivity. There was to be no
record of marital disputes, children’s problems, or family disharmony. In a sense, Helen, with the consent of Anne and Charles, created the “Anne” of her published diaries. Through Helen’s eyes, Anne would become an asexual idealized woman, constantly struggling with herself for integrity. The flesh and blood Anne, with her rage and sensuality, would hover like a phantom beneath the text.

While Anne supported Charles in his land and wildlife conservation both in Maui and in Darien, she had no desire to follow him to the Philippines. Her jet lag, since the bout of viral pneumonia several years earlier, was growing more difficult, and “storms” of stomach pain would overwhelm her. Since Charles’s first visit with President Ferdinand Marcos, in 1969, his goal had been to preserve the “core forests” from devastation and development by European loggers. Convinced that the islands would be reduced to a wasteland, he asked Marcos and his ministers to pass protective legislation. Emmanuel Elizalde, Marcos’s minister of minority rights, a wealthy, Harvard-educated dilettante and playboy, was immediately intrigued by Charles’s efforts. Hoping to use Charles’s celebrity to advance his political ambitions, he granted Charles access to the interior jungles. After a survey flight of the islands in 1970, on which he was accompanied by
New York Times
reporter Alden Whitman,
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Charles and a group of hand-picked journalists, photographers, and anthropologists, were air-lifted to the rainforests of Mindanao, at the southernmost tip of the Philippines. There he would live among a lost and isolated Paleolithic tribe discovered by Elizalde several months before.

As the helicopter hovered, Charles dropped to the jungle floor, greeted by an orchid-leaf-clad member of the Tasaday tribe.
²¹
After being guided six-hundred feet up to the stream-rippled mountain of this Stone Age, cave-dwelling society, Charles spent eleven days living and observing them. Convinced that they were pure specimens of “primitive man,” he returned to Manila to consult with Marcos.
²²

Within days of Charles’s return to Darien, Marcos had enacted legislation that transferred ownership of fifty thousand acres to the twenty-five-member Tasaday tribe. Refusing to heed the experts who thought
Elizalde’s discovery a political hoax, Charles reveled in his victory. But after the November elections in the Philippines, and the decline of Elizalde’s political fortune, it became clear to Charles that the passionate exponent was less than honest. For the next fifteen years, martial law thwarted the efforts of scholars to study the Tasaday tribe. In the 1980s, however, it became clear that they were modern-day forest dwellers who, having been bribed by Elizalde with guns, clothes, and golf carts, had masqueraded for the international press. Later seen in jeans and T-shirts, cavorting around Elizalde’s Manila estate, they were understood to be pawns of his ambitions.
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Once again, Charles was duped by smooth-talking politicians eager to harness his popularity to their ends. The Stone Age tribesmen were hired actors, and the Paleolithic tribe did not exist.

After his return from the Philippine expedition, Charles was ill. During the winter of 1971–1972 he lost twenty pounds and was plagued by colds, coughs, and fevers, as well as a case of shingles. Weak and fatigued, he curtailed his traveling and remained home. Anne, though she worried about his weakness and infections, enjoyed his uninterrupted presence. Throughout 1971 and 1972, they worked together in Maui and in Switzerland, editing, rewriting, and shaping Anne’s diaries. As in the old days, Charles was both protective and strict. He would straighten up the kitchen and wash the dishes after sending her off to work. In the afternoon, when Anne was done, they corrected the details, the facts, and the presentation. They had published
Bring Me a Unicorn
and
Diaries and Letters 1922–1928
in 1971; in 1973 they completed the second volume,
Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead 1929–1932
.

By the summer of 1973, Charles knew that he was dying. He was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and told that the lesions had already spread to his lungs. Between the sessions of chemotherapy and radiation, he spent his time writing his memoirs, visiting his children and grandchildren, now numbering ten, and supporting efforts in behalf of land and wildlife preservation. In August 1973, he returned to his boyhood home, in Little Falls, to dedicate the family land as a state museum and park. In his speech he said, “If I had to choose between airplanes and birds, I would choose birds.”

Charles had mellowed through the years. After his transatlantic flight, he was certain that aviation was the wave of the future; that technology would bring enlightened perspective. But after the devastation of Europe, Charles no longer believed in the beneficence of “progress.” Technology was only as good as its masters; Science had to be governed by values. He turned back to nature in the hope of recapturing the lessons of his boyhood in the wilderness of Minnesota. His thoughts would echo his father’s Jeffersonian principles, and confirm the relationship between agrarian society and moral virtue. Nonetheless, Charles Lindbergh would never rescind his wartime views.

By mid-July 1974, there was nothing more his doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital could do. Defying their warning that he would not last the trip, Charles decided to return to Maui. Maui had come to feel like “home”—tinctured by memories of his boyhood on the Mississippi, and his childhood fantasies of solitary adventure in tropical jungles and warm island seas.
²⁴

Juan Trippe at Pan Am flatly refused to help him, but Sam Pryor was able to secure him a place on a United Airlines commercial flight. Carried into the cabin on a stretcher, Charles was cordoned off by curtains from tourists and staff. Anne, Land, and Jon sat by his side. His physician in Maui, Dr. Milton Howell, fearing that the Lindbergh home was too far from the medical clinic, borrowed a cottage on the sea three miles outside the town of Hana. For eight days, attended by two nurses around the clock, Charles lay in his seaside bed, taking charge of the preparations for his burial in the yard of an abandoned church he and Sam had restored several years earlier. He chose a eucalyptus coffin, sufficiently wide to accommodate his “broad shoulders,” and instructed his native-born friend Tevy Kahalevah to see that the grave would be large enough to accommodate Anne, eventually. He sketched in detail the drainage pipe system and the rock configuration necessary to maintain the integrity of the grave’s walls, and ordered for the gravestone a block of Vermont granite large enough not to tempt souvenir hunters. He chose lines from Psalm 139, his favorite, to be engraved exactly a quarter-inch into the surface of the stone, deep
enough so that wind and rain could not wash the words away. They read: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …”