America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (30 page)

A couple of days later, Lindbergh came back to 44 Agnestrasse by himself, and invited Brigitte out for a stroll. Like Marietta, Brigitte was partially disabled due to a bout with tuberculosis in childhood. Her right leg was lame. She took Lindbergh’s arm, and they took the streetcar to Odeonsplatz in the heart of Munich. As with wife number one, the courtship was swift. As the pair walked past the lions near the Field Marshal’s Hall, he told Brigitte the old saw about how when a man is in love, he can hear the stone lions roar. Putting his arms around her, Lindbergh added, “And I fell in love with you.” A passionate kiss followed. Two days later, on March 21, 1957, on their second “ground date,” Lindbergh was ready to declare his intentions. While he was not free to marry, he wanted to cement their union with some jewelry. Wearing a black beret over his comb-over—his thinning blond hair was now mostly gray—Lindbergh took Brigitte to the exclusive Andreas Huber jewelry store—Munich’s Tiffany—where he bought her an elegant Swiss watch for 390 marks. She would proudly wear this gift on her wrist for the rest of her life. (She treasured the receipt, which Dyrk would later find among her papers.) Seeing the expensive watch on the arm of her sister, Marietta soon put two and two together. For the time being, however, Valeska remained in the dark about her American lover’s new lover.

In the early summer of 1957, Lindbergh returned to Munich, where he spent a few days alone with Brigitte in her apartment (Marietta was off in Baden-Baden, receiving medical treatment). A few weeks later, he set up a veritable ménage à quatre in his twelfth-floor pad on the Via Polvese in Rome. This was the rented love nest that he had heretofore used for trysts with Valeska. On this visit in July 1957, Lindbergh slept in one bedroom with Valeska. Marietta, who was in the Eternal City to take an art course, and Brigitte, who was on summer vacation, shared the other. Lindbergh’s love life now resembled the plot of a romantic farce dreamed up by the master of the genre, French playwright Georges Feydeau. While all three German babes with whom he was cohabitating had fallen for him, his official mistress count stood at two—the seduction of Marietta was still to come. Though both Brigitte and Marietta knew about Valeska—and Marietta knew about Brigitte—Valeska still assumed that she was his sole mistress. And Brigitte, who would repeatedly bend over backward to accommodate Lindbergh, did not voice any objections to the status quo. For the next few weeks, accompanied by his harem, Lindbergh gleefully pranced around town and went on beach outings. “[The summer in Rome] was a wonderful time,” he would write Brigitte later that year.

A few months later, after Lindbergh added Marietta to his list of conquests, he had to figure out how to smooth over the inevitable stickiness between the sisters. “We will work the various problems out,” he wrote to Brigitte in early 1958. Reassuring her of a positive outcome, he added that “with the right approach everyone can end up with great happiness.” For Lindbergh,
right
meant whatever would allow him to do whatever he wished. He was delighted that Brigitte continued to accept his double-dealing and triple-dipping without so much as a whimper; the same went for Marietta. In contrast, Valeska was initially irate when she found out that she was no longer his only European mistress. The passivity of both Hesshaimer sisters may have had something to do with their trying socioeconomic circumstances. In addition to their medical ailments, which had landed both in sanitariums for years at a time, they had endured a series of major traumas.

In 1936, before either was a teenager, their father, Adolf Hesshaimer, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. At the end of the war, Marietta and Brigitte emigrated from Romania to Germany, where they fell on hard times, as the Communists ended up commandeering the entire family fortune. After they became pregnant, the Hesshaimer sisters both became financially dependent on Lindbergh, who proved to be generous, eventually helping them to buy houses. On most visits, he arrived armed with gifts, including toy fire trucks and foreign coins for the children (whom he presumably saw as obsessive collectors in the making). To Brigitte and Marietta, Lindbergh was a godsend who served as an insurance policy against a possible fall from bourgeois respectability. Not so to Valeska, who, as a descendant of Prussian aristos, was a woman of independent means.

Brigitte, who also had had an abortion a few years before meeting Lindbergh, seems to have been even more slavishly devoted to her American sugar daddy than Marietta. In late 1962, after explaining to Brigitte that he had fathered a child by Marietta “because it was really important for
her
” (italics mine), Lindbergh asked Brigitte to travel to Marietta’s home in Switzerland to help her sister recover from the delivery. A month later, he wrote to thank Brigitte, noting that “[your assistance] touches me more deeply than I can explain to you.” The sexagenarian sex addict was finally getting some of the unconditional mother love that Evangeline Land had never sent his way. But by then, it was much too late. For the rest of his life, the self-absorbed celebrity would continue to burden his concubines with his neurotic tics. As part of the deal, Lindbergh insisted that both Brigitte and Marietta—but not Valeska, as she had her own funds—compile household account books in which they tracked every pfennig of the allowance that he provided. “A few days before every one of my father’s visits, my mother would take out all her receipts and start organizing them in order to update and balance the account books,” Dyrk told me. “During this time, she was often very nervous and grumpy.”

While Lindbergh was alive, Valeska’s two children were informed of his real identity, but not the five children born to the two Hesshaimer sisters. Brigitte told Dyrk and his siblings that he was in fact a writer named Careu—“Charles” in Hungarian—Kent, as he alleged, though she did acknowledge that he had another family back in America. “When I was very little, I called him Father,” stated Dyrk. “And afterwards, I called him Careu.” To communicate with Lindbergh, who knew just a few words of German, Dyrk, whose English wasn’t very good during his father’s lifetime, relied on his mother as a translator. “As I got older,” Dyrk noted, “I found it surprising that even though my father was an author no one seemed to know, he was so well connected. I was amazed that he had met with people such as Henry Ford, the Kennedys, Neil Armstrong, and Richard Nixon.” Fearful that Dyrk and his younger siblings might make the connection in the weeks following Lindbergh’s death in August 1974, Brigitte removed pictures of their father from the family’s photo album. That summer, she also managed to prevent her three children, then aged between seven and sixteen, from seeing any of the obituaries that appeared in German newspapers and magazines and on German TV. However, about a decade later, a tearful Brigitte was forced to acknowledge the deception when confronted by a twenty-five-year-old Astrid, whose thorough library search on Careu Kent had come up empty.

It was Wednesday, April 5, 1961. Thirty-four springs after touching down in Le Bourget, the Pan Am consultant was a bit player in the aviation biz. The new air heroes were astronauts such as Russia’s Yuri Gagarin who, a week later, would become the first human to journey into space. Comparing the two pioneers, the
New York Times
reminded readers that month, “Each won a race to which the entire world was an audience.”

The master organizer’s miraculous solo flights now took place not in the heavens, but on the ground, as he weaved across Central Europe, heading to and from each of his European families. His new vehicle of choice was a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle—his “love bug”—that he had recently purchased in Switzerland. And for these arduous journeys, a key part of the challenge was to make sure that no one would be watching.

The former pilot was not quite the proverbial sailor with a lover in every port. His three main squeezes were located within driving distance of one airport—Frankfurt International.

Pulling into a VW dealership in Walldorf, not far from the airport, Lindbergh politely asked in English (he spoke not a word of German), “I’ve got a problem. Can you help me?”

“No problem,” responded Gerald Schroeber, the English-speaking salesman who handled all the American customers. According to Schroeber, who recalled the conversation four decades later in an interview with Rudolf Schroeck, Lindbergh gave his true name and age. But when asked if he was the famous aviator, he said, “I’m often asked this question. No, the aviator is a distant cousin of mine.”

Lindbergh explained that he was looking for a place where he could both park his Beetle and have it serviced, adding that he lived in America and flew in to Frankfurt four times a year, staying a few weeks each time.

By then, the fifty-nine-year-old Lindbergh had been romancing his trio of German lovers for several years, and three of his European children had already been born. His aim was to bring more order to his affairs.

For the next thirteen years, he would use the parking spot in Walldorf as his base, from which he would drive his love bug about 20,000 kilometers a year; his quarterly visits with each family would rarely last more than several days. A routine would be set in stone. First, he would drive 600 kilometers south to hook up with the Prussian Valeska and her two children, who were then living in the Swiss canton of Ticino located near the Italian border. Without telling Valeska his destination, he would next head west some 210 kilometers to Wallis, to the waiting arms of Marietta Hesshaimer and her two children. The last stop was 600 kilometers away in Bavaria where Brigitte lived with her three Lindberghs. And then it was another secret 400-kilometer trip in the Beetle back to Frankfurt.

After two hundred thousand kilometers, the Beetle’s four-cylinder Boxer engine died. But the thrifty Lindbergh—with a history of deep attachments to machines—refused to consider tossing his car. Harking back to his days in the black laboratory, Lindbergh chose an organ transplant instead, plopping down 1,000 marks on a new engine. After his last ride in the spring of 1974, the speedometer of the VW with the Swiss license plate—GE-9473—recorded a figure just shy of three hundred thousand.

Like his planes of the 1920s, Lindbergh’s love bug also served as a surrogate home. “My father,” Dyrk told me, “had the seats redesigned so he could sleep in it in his sleeping bag. It was very well-organized and contained everything he needed, including a water tank as well as a steady supply of dried milk powder and Muesli.”

Even though the young Dyrk didn’t know his father was the famous aviator, his old man was still his hero. In a talk that he gave to his school class when he was about ten, Dyrk referred to his father—rather than any movie star or
athlet
e—as his
Vorbild
(role model). “I was impressed that he knew a lot about a lot of different things,” Dyrk stated. Careu Kent expressed particularly strong and informed opinions about the design of machines. He liked Volkswagens because they were simple. When the teenage Dyrk built a plastic model of the Concorde, his father couldn’t help but jump in with his assessment, arguing that the jumbo jet used too much fuel and was not economical enough. “He was right, of course,” noted Dyrk.

After reading Scott Berg’s biography in the late 1990s, Dyrk was perplexed. “The portrait the author painted wasn’t consistent with my experience. I never saw my father as a cold and unemotional tyrant,” he recalled. “While he wasn’t around much, he was always very engaged with us during his visits. In the United States, he had the burden of being a public person. But in Europe, where he could move around as he liked, he was relatively relaxed. My family was very fond of him. When I spoke to my mother about him in the 1990s, she still had a glimmer in her eyes. She never had an interest in finding another man. He was the love of her life.”

On Friday, August 16, 1974, Lindbergh was trying to summon up the strength to organize a final flight.

The seventy-two-year-old was stuck in the Intensive Care Unit at Manhattan’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He was dying of cancer, and his team of eleven doctors said that even if they stepped up his chemotherapy, he was unlikely to live more than a few weeks.

“I want to go home,” he told his startled wife, Anne.

Home was then some five thousand miles away in Maui. His doctors were reluctant to let him leave the ICU, much less fly across America. But as with his signature flight a half century earlier, he could not back down from the challenge. “No one,” Anne later stated, “believed he could do either and survive.”

Five years earlier, Lindbergh had built a modest two-story house with few modern conveniences—it had no phone—in the isolated Hawaiian town of Hana. Anne was not thrilled with the idea, but reluctantly agreed when he promised not to travel so much. But that was a ruse; he stayed in the house overlooking the Pacific Ocean at most two months a year. In the end, he had left Anne stranded on one side of the earth while he pursued his sexual adventures on the other. Knowing what we now do of his nefarious intentions, Anne’s diary entries and letters penned from Hawaii, where she felt “dropped out of the world,” can be painful to digest. “What a romantic C is! Imagine buying a vacation home without even trying out the climate and locale for one season!” a lonely Anne noted in her diary on February 1, 1969. Two years later, she complained to a friend, “This is the most isolated place on earth: 35–45 minutes from the nearest village.”

That same day from his bed in the ICU, Lindbergh sent out a final love letter to all three German mistresses. The text was the same in each. “The situation is extraordinarily serious.… All that I can send you,” he wrote in blue pen on blue airmail paper, “is my love to you and the children.” In a postscript, which he added to the missives to Brigitte and Marietta, he noted that he had set up a Swiss bank account to provide for the family after his death. To the self-sufficient Valeska, he would not leave any money. “My father made sure that we were well taken care of,” stated Dyrk, who noted that neither he nor his siblings has ever sought any financial compensation from his father’s American heirs. “We went public only because we wanted to be officially recognized as members of his family.”