Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (19 page)

A warm haze blanketed the northeast on the morning of May 27. Camouflaging their anxiety beneath a flurry of activity, Anne, Con, and Elisabeth walked through the “old” courtyard garden to pick forget-me-nots for Anne’s bouquet. While Elisabeth arranged the larkspur and columbine, Con and Anne walked together through the gardens on the hills above the house. Sworn to secrecy, the servants diligently attended to their chores, ensuring that the routine would remain unbroken.

Later that morning, in a gambit to distract the press, Anne and Charles went driving in Charles’s car, wearing the clothes they had worn the day before at Betty’s birthday reception. They visited the home of friends, Dr. and Mrs. H. G. Ward, where formal photographs of the bride and groom were taken.

Shortly after noon, twelve of the guests assembled for lunch in the grand dining hall: the Morrows, Evangeline Lindbergh, Betty’s mother and sisters, Vernon Munroe, Aunt Maud, Uncle “Dutch,” and Betty’s friend Amey Aldrich. Anne loved the warmth of her family and friends and was too nervous, she later wrote, to eat her favorite asparagus dish.

After lunch, as if to taunt the press one more time, Anne and Charles took a ride about town. Dressed in the same clothes they had worn that morning, they nodded to the reporters as they whisked by.

At three-fifteen, according to an arranged telephone code, the wedding guests, also in the clothes they had worn the preceding day, walked casually up the winding drive and into the sunken courtyard. Greeted, this time, by Betty alone, they went through the main foyer, now shaded, and into the large drawing room. With the shades closed to the afternoon sun, the room with its elaborately carved oak walls and fifteen-foot ceilings was like a church.

Anne, meanwhile, prepared herself in the downstairs ladies’ dressing room, adjusting her full floating gown and lacing the larkspur and columbine her sisters had gathered into her handmade Brussels cap.
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At a signal from her maid, Charles came into the room, wanting again to reassure her. He was followed by Betty, Elisabeth, and Con, who kissed her before leaving her with their father. Gently, he offered his arm, and they walked through the hall and down the three stone steps, pausing at the double doors of the drawing room.

On cue from Betty, Minister William Allen Brown, tall and stately, rose to his feet. Everyone, in hushed excitement, turned to see the bride.

Betty sighed with joy at her daughter’s loveliness as she walked toward Charles. She seemed like a vision in her crême white chiffon dress, worn with the silver French veil she and Elisabeth had chosen. The veil, set in her soft wavy hair, fell to her shoulders, resting like a cloud in the folds of her dress.

Smiling proudly, Dwight escorted Anne through the arc of family and friends toward the fireplace to meet Charles.

The service, Betty noted, was spare but elegant, and no one seemed to notice Charles’s required changes in the ceremony. The ring was passed in a circle of blessings, from Charles to Betty, then to Minister Brown, and finally back to Charles. Charles, in a plain blue suit, placed it on Anne’s finger. No one, to the public’s chagrin, dared to describe the wedding kiss.

Nonetheless, the proclamation of marriage was met with a flood of emotion from family and friends, who embraced them with good wishes, hugs, and kisses. Afterward, Anne and Charles cut the cake, and everyone lingered to eat and talk.

The frosting, wrote Betty, was as hard as cement, and the punch was perfectly awful. Anne, however, noticed little more than the circle of love in her family. To her delight, Charles felt the same.
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To Anne, it was as if his approval confirmed their worth.

After the reception, Anne returned to her bedroom with her sisters and Betty to change her clothes for the wedding trip. She wore a dark blue traveling dress and a blue hat of felt and straw. Rushing out the
door, Anne turned to wave goodbye, stopping one last time to relish the moment. Raising her arms in sad farewell, she steadied herself against the rising summer wind.
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In a note written to her mother on the day of her wedding, Anne described her feelings upon leaving: “I have a permanent happy solid feeling of holding hands with both you and Charles.”
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M
arried three months, Anne and Charles make a mail route survey tour for Pan Am through the Caribbean
.
Trinidad, September 1929
.

(Sygma)

A
t six-fifteen in the evening, two hours after Anne and Charles had slipped through the cordon of police and reporters with a casual nod, Morrow’s friend Dutch Hulst came motoring down the driveway. He stopped at the gate and said to Fitzpatrick, a young policeman, “Tell the boys that Colonel Lindbergh and Miss Morrow were married by Dr. Brown.”
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Within the hour, and with an unmistakable air of victory, Dwight Morrow drove down the hill, accompanied by his secretary, A. H. Springer. The car came to a stop and the reporters crowded around to congratulate him and to ask for details of the wedding. Always the gentleman, Morrow apologized for their trouble but refused to discuss particulars. Nodding politely toward his secretary, he informed them that Mr. Springer would explain “everything you want to know.”
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On Morrow’s departure, Springer pulled from his pocket a stack of duplicate, typewritten slips of paper, which he handed out after reading aloud the message: “Mr. and Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow announce the marriage of their daughter Anne to Charles A. Lindbergh at Englewood, New Jersey, May 27, 1929.
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“That is all,” he said firmly, and turned back up the hill.

The reporters scrambled for their cars, and everyone inside the house was jubilant. Elisabeth, Con, and Connie stood in the middle of Elisabeth’s bedroom and screamed at the top of their lungs, just to prove they could.
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With much ingenuity and hard work, the Morrows
had beaten the press at its own game and had savored the sweetness of a family wedding beyond the glare of camera lights and gawking mobs.

If the price of their hoax was to be public derision, the Morrows were more than glad to pay it. The press treated them like thieves who had robbed it of a story, but their friends applauded their cleverness and courage. Hundreds of telegrams arrived at the Morrow estate, singing their praises and wishing the bride and groom a safe journey.

A tirade of criticism broke out in the newspapers, igniting a national debate about who owned Lindbergh. The issue was a matter of property rights: what constituted public domain? Did Lindbergh, “a Grade A public figure,”
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have the right to remove himself from the adoring American public?

“We made him,” the reporters railed. “Why won’t he play ball with us?” They admitted that they hadn’t flown his plane across the ocean, but, they reasoned, had it not been for their publicity, Lindbergh would not have become a hero. Furthermore, without the press he would not have met Anne Morrow or started “on the road to riches.”

The problem, of course, was the element of truth, but it was tantamount to saying that astrologists owned the moon. For the first time, the press had the technology to create a global commodity distinct from the person it represented. The question was not who owned Lindbergh; it was who owned Lindbergh’s public persona. And the answer was becoming eminently clear. The press would tell Lindbergh’s story at its discretion, with or without his knowledge or consent. The Lindberghs, after all, were the best show in town.

The editors of
The New Republic
wrote, “Lindy and Anne were a motion picture come true. They convinced every idealistic person that there was some justice in the world, after all.”
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But the line between fantasy and reality had blurred, wrote the editors. The public demanded to be entertained like “a vaudeville audience on a hot summer afternoon.” Its inability to empathize with the “beleaguered” pair would stir up this kind of rebellion, but it was exactly the family’s secrecy, warned the editors, that would excite their predators.

Alone on their honeymoon yacht, Anne and Charles had little knowledge of the public commotion they had caused. They sailed up Long Island Sound and up the waters of the New England coast on a thirty-eight-foot motorboat, the
Mouette
, French for “seagull,” borrowed from their friend Harold Bixby, one of the backers of Charles’s transatlantic flight. Working in the hull of the boat in the heat of midday, Anne was not thinking about their public image. She was trying to make sense of Charles’s notions of marine “housekeeping.” She spent most of her time arranging cans and boxes of food in the ship’s pantry. She could understand neither the purpose of her task nor the absurd amounts of gourmet food—shrimp, pâté de foie gras, even plum pudding.
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Either Charles expected an impending disaster or a formal dinner party for twelve—in any case, she was certain they would never run out of food.

Intent upon laying down his rules from the beginning, Charles Lindbergh played his honeymoon like an upscale version of an army boot camp. The press may have cast him in the role of romantic lover, but Charles drew on the only example of intimacy he had ever known—father and son on a camping trip in the woods. And while Anne had a visceral sense that something was wrong, as usual she blamed herself. She wondered why she was dissatisfied at spending the whole day cleaning the boat. The completion of her daily tasks did give her a feeling of self-sufficiency, she wrote home; the problem was that the chores were never-ending. Charles navigated the boat while Anne played the docile housewife, cooking meals and washing dishes, mopping the floors and the decks, making the bed and cleaning the bathroom, only to begin again the next morning. Charles’s demands were strange, and yet, at the same time, “natural.” Nonetheless, she didn’t feel like a bride. In fact, she didn’t feel female at all. She felt more like Charles’s “little boy.”
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Even as Charles was training Anne as a petty officer, Anne was brewing a mutinous plan. Before she left, she had packed a book of poetry, a collection of ditties and pleasant poems; something unintimidating that she thought would capture Charles’s attention. On a quiet morning, with the yacht at anchor, Anne seated Charles on a deck chair
in the sun and read to him. “He was bored to tears,” Anne later said. She was about to give up when he grabbed the book and leafed through it. To Anne’s surprise and pleasure, he chose a romantic poem by a A. E. Housman and read it aloud. “Never underestimate the basic instincts of a fine mind,” she later told a friend. “Even if it is uneducated.”
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Back in Englewood, Betty settled into her rigorous social routine, and Elisabeth welcomed the solitude of the empty house. Sitting on the floor of her room, in the shadow of her four-poster bed, she wrote to Connie, apologizing for her dreadful behavior during the days before the wedding, and reminding Connie that life was good even in the face of adversity. Life could play tricks that were cruel, not funny. The only satisfaction for the soul, she concluded, was to search for truth and beauty.
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