Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (9 page)

There were those back home who heartily agreed that the new American Embassy was a “decadent” extravagance. Several members of Congress were outraged by the appropriation of $150,000 for the neoclassic European “palace,” with its iron gate and white pillared façade. It was to them a piece of “pernicious political architecture,” a symbol of monarchy and corruption rather than of democratic equality. Nonetheless, the State Department deemed it a necessity to preserve the “dignity” of the American ambassador. America, after all, had won
the Great War, and Mexico was merely the “backyard” of Texas.
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Lindbergh’s presence justified their vision.

By the time Anne arrived, Lindbergh had been in Mexico City nearly a week. The Mexicans had kept their promise to receive him with a grandeur rivaling that of the capitals of Europe. It was Paris and London all over again. Calling him the “unaccredited Ambassador of the Air,” the parliament summoned him to address a special session. “Humanity,” said one deputy, “has taken wings.” Their countries would move together toward a common destiny, aware that war would be as destructive to the victor as to the vanquished. We are, said the minister, brothers who must rise above petty concerns, “triumphantly traveling toward the sun.”
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They paraded Lindbergh through their streets and along the waterways, showering him with flowers and serenading him with music. Lindbergh’s straight-laced, laconic style made him all the more regal and elegant. In the seven months since his transatlantic flight, he had cultivated a public persona. Instinctively, he understood the power of his fame and leaped at the chance to mold the public’s view of aviation. He spoke with a steady, determined intensity, as though the future of flight had become his personal cause. His manner had lost some of its baby-faced naïveté; his jaw and cheekbones were angular and lean. And when he walked, he sometimes strutted, hands in pockets, leaning easily into his stride. No longer content to be led like a puppy, he walked in front of the official entourage, savvy in the ways of government ceremony and facile in his handling of the crowds.
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On the night of Anne’s arrival, Morrow was entertaining Lindbergh alone in the public rooms of the embassy. Great fires burned in the stone fireplaces as waistcoated manservants attended to their every need. After dinner, Morrow and Lindbergh returned to the family residence, stopping to chat in Morrow’s study. Betty, preoccupied with her children in the second-storey rooms, was surprised to hear voices in the study below.

“Anyone there?” she called from the top of the stairs.

“Oh, no,” said Morrow, restraining his pride. “Only Colonel Lindbergh.”

Collecting her daughters, Betty marshaled them into the study to greet him. While Morrow welcomed the presence of his family, the entrance of the women seemed to faze Lindbergh. He stood by the desk, shifting from foot to foot, as Morrow relinquished the floor to the women.

Betty and Anne sat silently on the sofa while Elisabeth gently took control. Skillfully, she directed the course of conversation, juggling small talk with the “marvelous executiveness” of a “Lady of the White House.”
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Betty had warned her daughters to stick to the subject of aviation. Lindbergh, she told them, was uncomfortable with talk of other topics. But Elisabeth brazenly tested the borders.
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“How did you like the bullfight?” she asked, knowing full well that Lindbergh had caused a stir with his attendance.

Shifting nervously, Lindbergh replied that it wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time.

In fact, Lindbergh had thumbed his nose at the American groups intent on protecting animal rights. The Mexicans, he said, had the right to choose their national sport. He would not insult his hosts in the name of righteousness.

Convinced, now, of her mother’s wisdom, Elisabeth retreated behind small talk.

Would he show them the sombrero he had received as a gift? she asked.

Relieved, Lindbergh left the room to retrieve the hat and then, steadied by the prop, passed it around like a laboratory specimen, articulating in detail its distinctive features.

To Anne, his cool, impersonal performance was nothing short of “breathtaking.” So restrained and direct, he seemed as classic as the pillared room in which he stood. To Anne, he was “the most beautiful, most stupendous achievement of our age,” a medieval “cathedral,” standing in testimony to all that was virtuous and good.
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When Morrow authoritatively brought the evening to a close, Anne was grateful and thoroughly exhausted. Once she returned to her room,
she felt out of control. “I cannot express this delicate thing … all I can feel is: my instruments are too small, too inadequate …”
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All she had was the strength of her will to keep her from falling apart until she could make sense of her feelings and hear a signal from the gods.

The next day, while Elisabeth toyed with Lindbergh as if he were a younger brother, playing on his self-consciousness with the clever banter of a sophisticated elder, Anne grew silent and withdrawn. Wide-eyed and frozen, she found it almost impossible to talk. She stuttered and mumbled when he asked her questions, finally admitting it was her habit to “listen.”
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And yet they were drawn like magnets, observing each other across the vastness of rooms, colliding in the courtyard when they least expected to, playing visual games of hide and seek. But for all their flirting, Anne could not permit her eyes to meet his. So bright, so blue, she couldn’t bear their intensity.
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That night at dinner in the residence, Elisabeth and the Colonel argued fiercely about the relative merits of Western and Chinese civilization and philosophy, as Anne watched quietly, analyzing the dynamics of their exchanges.

Charles was measured and controlled, setting forth his arguments with focused confidence. Elisabeth, Anne noted, argued well, but she was no match for his disciplined intelligence.

Fencing with his saber-sharp mind, Elisabeth was intimidated by his logical precision. It was obvious, even to her, that she had lost the game.
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Unaware of her sister’s feelings of inadequacy, Anne envied her courage. Elisabeth’s bold manner, however, was not the stuff of fortitude; it was the simple fact of romantic indifference. Elisabeth had set her sights not on marriage, but on friendship and career. Her polished and cerebral attitude belied her sensuous and romantic nature. While she obliged her parents with the behavior of ideal femininity, in truth she had little interest in men. She found them arrogant and dull, not half as interesting as Connie Chilton, whom she had met at Smith. Tall and husky, with a commanding presence, Connie showered Elisabeth with love and attention.

In the two years since Elisabeth left Smith, her love for Connie had become consuming, eclipsing her interest in those around her. In fact, Lindbergh’s presence heightened her certainty. The face Lindbergh saw across the table was the cover of a confused and fragile young woman who feared her instincts and prayed for her salvation.
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As the dinner progressed, there were shouts outside the walls of the residence, as though a great crowd were assembling. To Anne the sound was terrifying; it was like the crowds who had battered the palace walls during the French Revolution. Feeling somewhat like Marie Antoinette as she clinked her crystal goblet and ate from her china plate, Anne was frightened by Lindbergh’s equanimity. While she shivered to the sounds of the chanting crowd, Lindbergh, she noted, “went on unconsciously eating.”
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After dinner, a delegation of students called on Lindbergh, addressing him in childlike, flowery English. Lindbergh listened carefully, leaning forward in his seat, lending them his dignity as they spoke. In gratitude, he merely shook their hands, accepting their praise with silent restraint. And then he walked to the balcony window, the Morrow family following, and waved to the pushing, jostling crowd.

“Viva Lindbergh,” the mob roared, as boys scaled the walls to touch his hands. Lindbergh hailed the crowd from the balcony while Anne watched from behind. The faces seemed strange, the sounds and songs were primitive. Anne wondered what would happen if the people’s energy turned bad, if the fervor of their admiration became anger. She wondered how Lindbergh interpreted his “mad popularity,” but he seemed not to think about it at all.
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Lindbergh let the warmth of the household embrace him and reveled in the easy reciprocity of the Morrow family. There was something familiar, intuitively akin; they all knew exactly what he wanted and accepted him according to his own rules. In fact, Anne and Elisabeth were working hard behind the scenes to make it appear that way.

He was so fragile, such a boy. They tried to be lighthearted and nonchalant in his presence,
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as one would try to win the trust of a child.

With Christmas approaching, the Morrows encouraged Lindbergh to extend his stay. At their urging, he telephoned his mother, Evangeline, and invited her to join him at the embassy and then arranged for a Ford trimotor plane to carry her the twenty-two hundred miles from Detroit to Mexico City.

On the periphery of her son’s life since he left five years earlier, Evangeline Lindbergh had expected to spend the holidays alone. She was more than pleased to accept the invitation. After four days of flying over the United States, stopping each night in a different town, Evangeline landed in Mexico City on December 21. Thousands of people gathered to greet her; the public reception rivaled her son’s. She was, after all, a piece of Lindbergh, and the press insisted on making her a hero. Without her intent, Evangeline had achieved a long-distance record for passenger flight; no woman had ever flown so long or so far. When her plane touched down, the crowd charged, and Evangeline, frightened, opened her cabin window, trying to shoo the people away from the deadly force of the propellers.

At fifty-five, Charles’s mother had lost the elegance of her youth. Once beautiful and slim, she had grown thick and fleshy. Now that Charles was gone and her husband and her parents were dead, she lived in Detroit with her brother, teaching chemistry at a local high school. Stylish enough in her broad-brimmed hat and flowered silk dress, Evangeline had an air of forced gentility, as though she had to marshall all her strength to keep herself under control. With great effort, she had channeled her sweeping moods and compulsive habits into neat compartments; the volatility of her youth seemed to have been mere eccentricity. But Evangeline had never wanted to fit into a mold; the public life of her husband had held no appeal to her. Now, suddenly, as Charles Lindbergh’s mother, she felt a part of “the real thing.” The invitation to spend Christmas with the Morrows at the American Embassy filled her with hope and gratitude.
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Elated by her adventure and the cheering of the crowd, Evangeline amused the press with stories of her travels. The airplane, she announced with certainty, was a mode of travel here to stay, and Mexico
was more beautiful than she had ever imagined. No, she hadn’t brought her son a Christmas present; his only interest was in machines. She apologized for the inadequacy of her words. She was saturated with feelings, but none she wished to share with the public. One should never “air one’s emotions,” she asserted firmly, to the disappointment of the hungry press.

Flattered and photographed, Evangeline sipped her tea in the embassy reception hall, waiting anxiously for Charles to arrive. Fresh and eager from a stunt performance, he moved swiftly through the doors to greet her. She rose in response and they smiled warmly, clasping each other’s hands in greeting. He ushered her toward the Morrows and their entourage of American officials, and then into the quiet of a private room, beyond the glare of lights and reporters.

While Elisabeth saw only Evangeline’s strength, Anne saw straight through to her sadness. Mrs. Lindbergh, used to small-town politics, was like an actress suddenly thrust onto the stage. She did, however, rise to the occasion, immediately sensing what was required and readily aware of its implications for her son. There was perfect harmony between mother and son, Anne noted in her diary.
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The consonance of mother and son was testimony to their common past—the past they had lived together for twenty years on the periphery of a society that had denied their legitimacy. They had learned to accept, even to savor, their isolation, making it the outward sign of their superiority. And yet the full, rich Morrow household evoked their sense of loss. For the first time, Evangeline understood what might have been had she stayed married and played by the rules. The Morrows were the family she and Charles had never had.

Evangeline’s arrival in a trimotor plane, large enough to accommodate many people, opened the possibility that the Morrows could go on a flying excursion with Charles. When Lindbergh insisted on taking the Morrow children for a ride, they were politely demure but secretly “thrilled.” Anne quietly prayed for “consciousness,” not her ordinary half-asleep daze. She wanted to truly experience flying; she wanted to remain aware.

A crowd gathered around the hangar, and the silver plane glimmered in the morning sun. When Anne, Elisabeth, and Con boarded the plane, it felt as if they were in one of Ford’s cars, but instead of the straight velvet seats, the chairs were wicker and tipped at an angle by the nose of the plane. Excited yet afraid, she looked out at the photographers and the press, feeling the separateness that came with celebrity. Lindbergh, smiling, sauntered across the field in a business suit and gray felt hat. He stepped inside, greeted the girls, and, bowing to protect his head, took his place at the controls.

As the engine raced, Anne shivered with excitement. The plane rolled faster and faster, and she heard the wind “hiss” through the window. She saw the trees and hangars whirl by; she hardly noticed the plane ascending. Thrilled to be together and flying with Lindbergh, the three young women moved forward to the cockpit to watch him. He sat quietly at ease, one hand on the wheel, looking relaxed and perfectly in control. Anne noted his “tremendous hands,” with their strong grasp, and his harmonious movements. Once she had summoned the courage to look out the window, she savored every small sensation, trying to keep a semblance of composure as her body pulsed to each gentle lift of the ascent.