By any measure, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were extraordinary people — he the valiant aviator, she an acclaimed writer.
The couple’s enduring union was its own feat of daring. Theirs was far from a marriage of true minds, and yet the two stayed together for 45 years, until his death.
“Solo and Together: Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an Enigmatic Life and Marriage” lays bare just how challenging the relationship could be, especially for the sensitive and introverted Anne, coping with a husband who was frequently controlling, closed off and stubbornly willful.
James R. Hansen, also the author of “First Man,” a biography of Neil Armstrong, set out to tell the Lindberghs’ joint story without judgement.
“They had a remarkable marriage not because it was ideal but because it was so intensely human,” Hansen told The Post. “And the triumphs and failures in their lives are almost inseparable.”
It started as a glorious romance. Lindbergh became a global celebrity overnight after piloting a single-engine plane across the Atlantic solo in May 1927, aged 25. He soon resolved to find a wife, someone with whom he could escape the public gaze and build a home and family. Many candidates presented themselves, but his mind kept returning to a quiet, very pretty 21-year-old, Anne Morrow, whom he had met over Christmas 1927 during a good-will tour south of the border.
Morrow’s wealthy father, Dwight, was then the American ambassador to Mexico. Anne, upon meeting the tall and handsome flier in Mexico City, felt immediately infatuated, although she was certain Charles preferred her lively older sister Elisabeth. After returning to Smith College, Anne wrote in her diary: “The idea of this clear, direct, straight boy … has swept out of sight all other men I have ever known, all the pseudo-intellectuals, the sophisticates, the posers.”
She was astonished when Lindbergh called her for a date — a flying one — in October 1928. In the skies over Long Island Lindbergh let her steer the two-seater de Havilland Moth plane for a time. The pattern of their early days was set; they were happiest and most at ease together in the air.
After a few more meetings, Lindbergh asked Anne to become his wife. Eager to avoid publicity, they married in the drawing room of the Morrow mansion in Englewood, NJ, with only family present. Decades later Anne remembered how, as a bride, everyone congratulated her for capturing “the hero of the hour.” And she saw herself then as a devoted page to Charles’s knight — “hardly,” she later admitted “a good basis for marriage.”
Anne trained as a radio operator and navigator to serve as Lindbergh’s co-pilot during a hazardous three-month expedition in 1931, surveying the air routes over Canada and Alaska to the Far East. She chronicled that journey in her first book, “North to the Orient,” which won a National Book Award.
The agonizing events of the following year tested the couple far more. Their toddler son, Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his nursery in their home in Hopewell, NJ, in March.
“Charles dealt with the tragedy by trying to control it, control the investigation and by suppressing his emotions,” Hansen explained to The Post. But, particularly after their son’s dead body was discovered in the nearby woods in May, “Anne needed to grieve, she needed to talk, and Charles responded by building emotional walls.”
Fleeing the media circus surrounding the investigation and trial of Bruno Hauptmann — later convicted of the baby’s murder and executed — the Lindberghs left the US to live abroad, first in England, later on a remote island off the coast of Brittany. Asked by the American government to assess the growing air power of Nazi Germany, Charles traveled there on several occasions. He lauded “the organized vitality” of the country, and believed that such was the Germans’ impressive military build-up no other European country could — or should — challenge them.
Anne was far more sensitive than Charles to how his admiration for the Nazis would play back home. After he was awarded a swastika-studded medal by Luftwaffe commandant Hermann Goering, she promptly dubbed it “the albatross.” Yet later, when Lindbergh joined the America First Committee and gave speeches across the US accusing Jews of undermining the national interest by agitating for America to join the war against Germany, Anne defended him. “Charles stands for integrity,” she told her mother, who tried in vain to convince her she was blinded by love. In fall 1940 Anne even published a short book, “The Wave of the Future” (which she later disavowed), expressing her view that fascism wasn’t worth fighting.
Second only to the kidnapping, this was the darkest chapter of their life together, and of Anne’s staunch defense of her husband, Hansen writes: “What she wasn’t asking was why Charles failed to examine his own prejudices in shaping his view of American’s path — or why she hadn’t examined her own.”
While the Lindberghs were unquestionably united in the face of both public and private condemnation, a decade later, in 1950, Anne, now 44, began to contemplate divorcing her husband. What had changed?
By this time, she had five children, three boys and two girls — the last, daughter Reeve, born in 1945. Charles was mostly away during the war, advising the Air Force in the South Pacific. Although technically a civilian, he did fly combat missions and on one shot down a Japanese plane. After peace came, he chose to go on working in distant corners of the world, leaving Anne home alone in Darien, Conn., for months at a time, supervising their large brood.
“Charles’s frequent absences continued to hurt,” Hansen writes, and so too, did his rigid and harshly critical style as a parent. He issued to each child a to-do list upon his departure and expected them to complete every item before his return. When Anne began seeing a psychiatrist, Charles fiercely disapproved, and stopped speaking to her for six months.
Anne later told Reeve she was waiting for her youngest to turn 10 before leaving Charles. But her decision to stay was eased by her growing closeness to Dr. Dana Atchley, her internist — a warm, witty and nonjudgmental man who likely became her lover for awhile. And the book she wrote during this strained time — “Gift From the Sea,” a mediation on solitude, work and human relationships — was an immediate bestseller when published in 1955, and has since sold three million copies worldwide.
The extent of Charles’ extramarital involvements is truly gob-smacking — he began an intimate relationship with his German secretary, Valeska von Arnim, and she bore him a son in 1958. At roughly the same time, he embarked on affairs with two of her friends — the sisters Brigitte and Marietta Hesshaimer. He eventually sired seven illegitimate children by these three German women.
Charles made regular visits to see his lovers and offspring, and brought the same discipline he’d honed as a flier to keeping his tri-partite other life a secret. Hansen believes Anne had her suspicions. “Anne knew something was up, but she didn’t know what it was, and she really didn’t want to know what it was,” the author told The Post.
When Lindbergh fell mortally ill with cancer in 1974, he was determined to die in his favorite place, the rustic A-frame he and Anne owned on the remote southeastern coast of Maui. The doctors warned that he might not survive the long trip from his Manhattan hospital bed to Hawaii, but Anne supported this wish. “Going along with how he was and how he wanted everything done, was so typically Anne,” Hansen writes.
Her husband instructed that his grave be dug in the church cemetery in Kipahulu, with room for Anne to be buried beside him. In the end, she declined that option. After she died in 2001, Anne’s body was cremated as she requested, and her ashes scattered in numerous places she had loved. Maui was among them.
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