In any event, Lindbergh’s work with Transcontinental and Pan Am kept him almost perpetually on the go in between other adventures. Anne was no stay-at-home wife but went with him as a sort of assistant and, in time, a radio operator-telegrapher and navigator. Together they crisscrossed the country—San Francisco with the famed woman flier Amelia Earhart; Cleveland for the air show and races; Santa Fe; Detroit to see Evangeline; Los Angeles for dinner with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the two biggest movie stars of the day; Washington; Kansas City; New York; and the newly elected president of the United States Herbert Hoover’s fishing camp in the Shenandoah Valley. In fact, there was no Lindbergh home to return to. During all these months they lived in hotels or stayed with Charles’s many new friends, who tended to be men of “substance”—bankers, lawyers, airline or railroad owners—and, of course, at Harry and Caroline Guggenheim’s mansion Falaise. Eventually, Anne became an enthusiastic pilot herself, with the great Lindbergh himself as her instructor. As a perfectionist, he expected nothing less from his wife, and in time she became an excellent flier.
The couple complemented each other in a symbiotic way. She was educated in classics and fine arts, while his interest in literature ran to (and stopped in the neighborhood of) Robert Service. He knew nothing of music and had a tin ear, while Anne played the piano. She was a student of fine arts and sculpture and he appreciated pictures of things he could readily identify.
On the other hand, he had developed a scientific mind that grasped the positions of the stars in the heavens and the curvature of Earth; ultimately he delved deeply into history, ancient and modern, anthropology, politics, philosophy, economics, and animal husbandry, of which he was already something of an expert. Above all he was a man of science. Nevertheless, Anne came to know him as a person of great sensitivity, as she had suspected almost from the beginning, and someone she could talk with easily.
And while all of that and everything else was going on, by the last of 1929 she managed to get pregnant.
AFTER A WHIRLWIND GOODWILL and air-route survey tour of the Caribbean basin with Mr. and Mrs. Juan Trippe of Pan Am—during which Anne was frequently discomforted by morning sickness, which she mistook for airsickness until the doctor confirmed she was going to have a baby—Anne moved into her parents’ house for the duration of her pregnancy. The press began gearing up for the big event by hovering around the gates of Next Day Hill like a stupendous flock of geese, and hyping the story of the forthcoming Lindbergh nativity as if it involved a royal heir. It was reported that newspapers were offering substantial bribes to telegraphers and phone operators for information regarding the event. For their part, Charles and Anne decided against giving the press even the courtesy of an announcement of the birth and arranged to notify Evangeline in Detroit by coded wire.
On June 22, 1930, coincidentally Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III came into the world, but it would be two more weeks before the Lindberghs would reveal to the press even the name of the child. Nevertheless, the occasion set off a delirious new round of worldwide rejoicing as tens of thousands of telegrams, flowers, cards, letters, and baby gifts—many of them quite elegant—flooded into Next Day Hill. Desperate for news and photographs of the Lindbergh heir, some newspapers began floating disgusting rumors of a birth gone wrong, forcing Lindbergh at last to call a press conference and give details about the baby. For its own part, the press in general was beginning to sour on what many interpreted as the constant whiff of arrogance in the great transatlantic hero, and a sort of mini-backlash occurred, with columnists suggesting that Lindbergh was, in effect, biting the hand that fed him. All in all it was an unpleasant episode in the Lindberghs’ seemingly intractable “war with the press,” but afterward, like fighters who have beaten each other into exhaustion, a kind of uneasy truce was declared—if not by Anne and Charles, then by the press—until the next round could begin. Around the same time, the Lindberghs were suffered to endure a shocking incident of reckless and inhumane invasion of privacy when gawkers managed to drive through the gate at Next Day Hill and run over Anne and Constance’s childhood pet terrier, Daffin, mortally injuring but not immediately killing the dog, and not even stopping to try and help.33
IT WAS DURING THIS SAME SUMMER OF 1930 that Lindbergh went to Cleveland for the air races and met for the first time the German flying ace Ernst Udet. They got along famously. While there, Lindbergh also ordered a new plane for himself and Anne, a low-wing, dual cockpit capable of flying long distances. It was modern in every aspect, from the latest navigation aids, a generator-based electrical system that could heat flying suits at high altitudes, and sliding plastic-style cockpit canopies of the type later used in World War II fighter planes.34 Lindbergh took delivery of the plane in Los Angeles and the two of them set out for New York, breaking the current speed record by three hours.
Now that a family had been started, Lindbergh at last turned to the task of making a home. Anne, who had hinted once that she would love to live in New England, knew that would never do because of its frequent fogs. Charles needed to be near but not in Manhattan, because of his association with Transcontinental and Pan Am and other business connections. They discussed Long Island because of its many flying fields, but Charles finally settled on an approximately five-hundred-acre tract of property not far from Princeton, New Jersey, where they could build a home that would at once give them privacy and access to airfields around the New York area and also remain close to Anne’s parents’ place at Englewood. It “had a brook, and fields and woodlands filled with beautiful oaks,” and as they began designing a house with the help of an architect, they meanwhile rented a quaint old farmhouse where Anne settled into motherhood.35
Charlie, as they called him, soon began to resemble his famous father, with the cleft chin, blue eyes, broad smile, and wavy shock of blond hair. Like many fathers, Lindbergh at first did not seem to know what to make of the baby, but as he grew into a toddler his father was soon “flying” him around the room above his head—“ceiling flying,” Lindbergh called it. There were two dogs in the family, a fierce Scottish terrier named Skean (Gaelic for “dagger”) and an equally intrepid fox terrier named Wagoosh (after Charles’s dog back in Little Falls). At that point the Lindberghs employed a maid, a cook, a butler, and soon hired a new baby nurse after the departure of their first one. She was twenty-four-year-old Betty Gow who had left her native Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of fourteen to earn her keep as a servant in America. Now she was about to figure in a horror that would soon darken the bright sun presently hovering over the Lindbergh household.
Charles had become increasingly restless during Anne’s pregnancy, which in its latter stages had more or less grounded him, except for a trying episode involving the investigation into the cause of the dreadful plane crash in Kansas that had killed Knute Rockne and seven others. This was the crash that had so concerned Eddie Rickenbacker, then general manager of TWA. As chairman of a federal aviation commission Lindbergh explained that the crash was due to a wing failure.
Now Lindbergh was proposing another “survey” flight such as the one recently undertaken through the Caribbean to sketch out new passenger air routes for Pan Am—only this time it would be a three-month grind reaching halfway around the earth from Washington to Alaska, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, with occasional stops along the way for food and fuel.
It is self-evident that any new mother who would consent to such a departure from her child must have uncommon devotion to her husband, and Anne filled this role to its uttermost degree. Charles had helped her become a pilot, as well as a radio-telegraph operator, and with dual controls in the Sirius she could spell him in periods of flying. It was this kind of partnership that he had envisioned when he proposed to her, though Anne had not understood it at the time.
Anne knew her life was now an adventure inextricably linked with her husband and, contrary to the opinions of some of her more recent biographers, didn’t seem un
comfortable with it.i “I went on them proudly,” she wrote later, “taking my place as a crew member. The beauty and mystery of flying never palled, and I was deeply involved in my job of operating the radio.”36
LIKE HIS TRANSATLANTIC TRIUMPH, the path to the Orient that Lindbergh chose to take had never been flown before—a 7,100-mile great circle route that would have him flying over some of the most desolate, inhospitable, and uncharted territory on the planet. In preparation, he again measured every item to be taken in terms of its weight, including a six-pound shotgun and limited number of shells in case they were forced down and had to hunt for food. The big, sleek, black-painted Sirius had been converted to a seaplane with pontoons for wheels, and a more powerful 600-horsepower engine was installed.j
On July 29, 1931, the Lindberghs landed the Sirius at the North Haven, Maine, summer home of the Morrows, and next morning Anne and Charles said good-bye to her parents and to baby Charlie, whom Charles had taken to calling “Buster,” and flew away to Washington, D.C., starting point for their great Arctic air exploration journey, which was expected to take four months.
From Ottawa they flew over “hundreds and hundreds of lakes, absolutely flat, and tall, thin pines,” to Moose Factory, Canada, where they were met after landing on the water by a delegation of Cree Indians and Hudson Bay Company men. They ate moose and raspberries (canned) and slept in a house built about 1650 that reminded them of an Edward Hopper painting, checked in with the Canadian Mounted Police, and flew on to Churchill, finding it “a little snappy, like fall.” Next morning they flew to Baker Lake, refueled at Point Barrow, then on to Aklavik where Anne got her first (and last, before Tokyo) bath in a tin tub, the only one in town.
During a long day after Nome they crossed the Bering Sea and found themselves flying off the northern coast of Siberia; fog was frequently a problem though Lindbergh usually managed to fly beneath it, except when he rose up to give antenna height for Anne’s radio-telegraph messages in which she several times daily tapped out their progress for all the world to note.
Night flying was no problem since there was virtually no night in those latitudes at this time of year, when the North Star was almost directly overhead. They landed in the harbor at Petropavlovsk and were given dinner of pork, beans, radishes, and Russian tea by the head of the local governing committee in a room plastered with posters of Lenin and other Soviet leaders.
On August 29 they landed in Tokyo Bay, but outside Tokyo, and spent the night in the home of a man who raised foxes for a living. At Nemuro the mayor gave them a ceremonial dinner complete with geisha girls to serve and dance. At Tokyo, however, it was different, more like the old days in France, England, and New York. Millions of Japanese mobbed them, shouting “Banzai! Banzai,” which means “May you live ten thousand years!”
They stayed in Japan for two weeks, visiting cities, then pushed on to Nanking and “the great expanse of China.” Seeing it from the air, Anne observed that “every bit of ground is cultivated in small, narrow strips, not at all like our Great Plains in the West … here it is almost terrifying; no trees, no wild land, nothing left but narrow back-yard strips of fields and mud huts representing thousands of people as far as one can see.”
The Yangtze River was in a dangerous flood stage, inundating an area equal to the size of Lake Superior, and those people who weren’t drowned were starving and in need of medicine. Lindbergh of course volunteered to help and nearly lost the plane. He and two doctors landed at the city of Hinghwa with a bag of vital medicines, which the Chinese thought was food and swam out to one doctor’s sampan, swamped it, and then swam to the plane and began to clamber aboard, tipping the wings dangerously, until Lindbergh took out his revolver and fired into the air, driving them away.
By this time Anne was missing Charlie, writing to her mother, “I dream about the baby every night, almost, and am quite homesick for you. But I want to see Peking before I start home.” She never got the chance.
They were headed to Shanghai when they spotted the big British aircraft carrier Hermes anchored in the rushing stream of the Yangtze, dropped down for a look, landed, and were greeted so cordially by Admiral Colin MacLean that they decided to stay for a few days, and Anne became the first woman ever to spend the night aboard the World War I–era warship. At night, MacLean considerately arranged for the ship’s crane to lift the Sirius aboard the carrier to protect it from river currents, thieves, or vandals, which very nearly lost the Sirius and the Lindberghs as well.
When the ship’s crew was attempting to drop the plane back into the water—with Charles and Anne in their cockpits—the Sirius wrenched around against the current while still in the grip of the ship’s crane’s cables and began to turn over. Charles cried, “Jump! Jump quickly!” and the two of them plunged into the Yangtze, quite possibly the most insanitary river on earth. Hampered by their heavy flying suits they floundered around until the ship’s tender came and fished them out, and once aboard the carrier the surgeon plied them with Bovril, a nourishing English tea-like drink, and castor oil, which was about all that was available in those times to ward off the Yangtze’s contaminated organisms.
The accident had caused a wing to be torn off the plane and other damage, but when at last it was dredged out of the rushing river Lindbergh believed it could be repaired in Shanghai and was in the process of arranging to take it there. Anne, somewhat agitated, wrote to her sister Elisabeth, “How long will it take to repair, and when will we get home?”
Sooner than she expected, but not in any way she might have wished. On October 5, a telegram came from home saying that her father, Dwight Morrow, by then a U.S. senator from New Jersey, had died of a brain hemorrhage. Anne was of course devastated and Charles immediately canceled the expedition, arranging their immediate passage to America and for the Sirius to be crated and sent to San Francisco.
Pan Am and the other airlines did not adopt Lindbergh’s northern route across the Pacific. Instead they chose the middle Pacific route with the famous Pan Am Clipper service that landed at Midway, Wake Island, and Guam before reaching the Orient.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1932 the Lindberghs moved into their new home in Hopewell, near Princeton, New Jersey, a white rambling six-bedroom brick, stone, and slate two-story manor-style house they named Highfields. They had hoped the place, with its extensive grounds and remote location, would give them the privacy they desired. Instead it became a house of horror.
Anne battled a case of ptomaine poisoning most of the winter and stayed at Next Day Hill with her mother. She seemed to gravitate to her family home, and a routine had settled in where she, Charles, and the baby—whom she called her “fat lamb”—would spend their weekdays at Englewood and go down to the Hopewell house on weekends. Betty Gow, the nursemaid, had taken up residence at Next Day Hill and Anne looked after Charlie, the fat lamb, herself. Soon her doctor confirmed that Anne was pregnant again. Charles said he hoped for a girl.
On the weekend of February 27, Charlie came down with a cold. He was still sick on Monday, which dawned cold and rainy, when Anne phoned Betty Gow to tell her they would remain in Hopewell. Charles had gone into his office in New York and phoned to say he was staying over and would be home next day.
On Tuesday, March 1, Anne caught the baby’s cold and asked Betty to come to Hopewell. That afternoon the weather had much improved and so had Charlie, and Anne took a walk around the grounds, then spent the rest of the afternoon with the baby in the living room. About 6:15, after feeding him, Anne and Betty tucked him into his crib and started closing the shutters, but those on the corner of the room were warped and would not close properly. Betty opened the window on the southern side about halfway, observing a custom of the day so as to let in “fresh air,” despite it being the dead of winter with temperatures in the low thirties. Then she turned off the light and closed the door. It was a little after 7:30.
Anne sat at her desk writing and waiting for Charles, who was late and did not arrive until after eight, and
the two had dinner about 8:30. Around nine o’clock, Charles heard a heavy noise, a kind of “thud” that sounded as if someone in the kitchen had dropped something—“such as a wooden box or orange crate.”
Charles went upstairs and bathed, then about 9:30 returned to the study to read, sitting beside the fire next to a window that was directly beneath the baby’s nursery windows where the shutters would not close. Charles read and Anne went up and bathed. While Anne bathed, Betty Gow went to check on the baby. It was ten p.m. She went into the bathroom and turned on the light, enough to see but not disturb him. She closed the window but suddenly realized she couldn’t hear him breathing. “I thought that something had happened to him,” she said later, “that perhaps the clothes were over his head. In the half light I saw he wasn’t there and felt all over the bed for him.” She rushed down the hall to the Lindberghs’ bedroom.
“Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?”
“No.”
“Then maybe the colonel has him!” Betty said, and bolted down the stairs to the library where Lindbergh was still reading.
“He isn’t in his crib?” Lindbergh asked, alarmed. He dashed upstairs to the nursery and found it empty, with Charlie’s imprint still on the bedclothes. Charles bounded down the passageway to the master bedroom where Anne was standing, bewilderedly; she had been to the nursery, and finding it empty she’d returned to her bedroom. She asked her husband if he had the baby, but Charles brushed past and went to his closet where he kept a rifle and headed back to the nursery. When he arrived, with Anne and Betty at his heels, and finding the crib of course still empty, he turned and said, “Anne, they have stolen our baby.”37