Lindbergh
“Charles Lindbergh’s is the ultimate American life, and A. Scott Berg’s new biography is the ultimate, and understated, exploration of that life … in an astonishing biography of a man who personified the future tense, no sentence is overwritten, no passage overwrought … a volume that captures not only the heroism but the anguish of Lindbergh—the haunting loneliness of being what Berg called ‘the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth.’”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“A biography that will be one of the publishing events of the year … one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century.”
—Vanity Fair
“Superb.”
—Time
“Berg’s narrative is brisk and unhysterical, well-suited to his subject … [a] vivid emotional portrait of Lindbergh.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“The most outstanding piece of nonfiction that I have read this year … Berg does a spectacular job of establishing why Lindbergh proves such a powerful icon for the 20th century … Lindbergh is a superior book because it’s an organic book, not some padded-out magazine article cobbled together from newspaper clips and earlier biographies. Instead, Lindbergh is a substantial piece of history that illuminates an important figure … It’s the kind of book that took almost a decade to create. And it’s worth it.”
—USA Today
“Fanatically researched and very moving … stunning in its fairness to a harsh and unknowable Charles Lindbergh.”
—Esquire
“Outstanding.”
—National Review
“A comprehensive and invaluable text.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh is an outstanding book on many counts, for its storytelling especially; but Berg’s accomplishment is in putting into perspective both the melodrama of Lindbergh’s life, and the complex personality who was its protagonist, and its reluctant—often rebellious—passenger … an unending store of memorable anecdotes.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Superb.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Recounts [Lindbergh’s] life with understanding, sympathy and a wealth of detail.”
—Parade
“A masterwork that does full, objective justice to one of the towering figures of our times.”
—Ft. Worth Star Telegram
“A richly detailed and deeply nuanced examination of a historic life in all its complexity … [a] must-read.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
ALSO BY A. SCOTT BERG
Kate Remembered
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
Goldwyn: A Biography
LINDBERGH
LINDBERGH
A. SCOTT BERG
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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LINDBERGH
Copyright © 1998 by A. Scott Berg
Cover photograph from the Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscript and Archives, Yale University
Book design by Marysarah Quinn
Photograph of the author © 1998 by Aloma
All rights reserved.
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PRINTING HISTORY
G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / September 1998
Berkley trade paperback edition / September 1999
ISBN: 978-1-101-49428-8
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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to
PHYLLIS E. GRANN
and
KEVIN McCORMICK
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1 KARMA
2 NORTHERN LIGHTS
3 NO PLACE LIKE HOME
4 UNDER A WING
5 SPIRIT
6 PERCHANCE TO DREAM
PART TWO
7 ONLY A MAN
8 UNICORNS
9 “WE”
10 SOURLAND
11 APPREHENSION
12 CIRCUS MAXIMUS
PART THREE
13 RISING TIDES
14 THE GREAT DEBATE
15 CLIPPED WINGS
PART FOUR
16 PHOENIX
17 DOUBLE SUNRISE
18 ALONE TOGETHER
19 ALOHA
Photo Insert
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES AND SOURCES
PERMISSIONS
INDEX
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
—EMERSON, “Brahma”
PART ONE
1
KARMA
“… living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests …”
—C.A.L.
FOR MORE THAN A DAY THE WORLD HELD ITS BREATH … and then the small plane was sighted over Ireland.
Twenty-seven hours after he had left Roosevelt Field in New York—alone, in the Spirit of St. Louis—word quickly spread from continent to continent that Charles A. Lindbergh had survived the most perilous leg of his journey—the fifteen-hour crossing of the Atlantic. He had to endure but a few more hours before reaching his destination, Paris. Anxiety yielded to anticipation.
The American Ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick, went to St. Cloud after lunch that Saturday to watch the Franco-American team-tennis matches. When he took his seat in the front row, five thousand fans cheered. During the course of the afternoon, people in the stands heard newsboys shouting the headlines of their éditions spéciales, announcing Lindbergh’s expected arrival that night. In the middle of the match, Herrick
received a telegram—confirmation that Lindbergh had passed over Valencia in Ireland. All eyes were on the Ambassador as he hastily left courtside, convincing most of the spectators that their prayers were being answered. Before the match had ended, the stands began to empty.
Herrick rushed back to his residence in Paris, ate a quick dinner at 6:30, then left for the airfield at Le Bourget, to the northeast of the city. “It was a good thing we did not delay another quarter of an hour,” Herrick recalled, “for crowds were already collecting along the road and in a short time passage was almost impossible.”
The boulevards were jammed with cars ten abreast. Passengers poked their heads through the sliding roof panels of the Parisian taxis, greeting each other in jubilation. “Everyone had acquired a bottle of something and, inasmuch as the traffic moved very slowly,” one reveler recalled of that night in 1927, “bottles were passed from cab to cab celebrating the earthshaking achievement.” A mile from the airfield, the flow of traffic came to a standstill.
Once the radio announced that Lindbergh had flown over southern England, mobs formed in the heart of Paris. Thirty thousand people flocked toward the Place de l’Opéra, where illuminated advertising signs flashed news bulletins. Over the next few hours, the crowds spilled into the Boulevard Poissonière—until it became unpassable—where they expected to find the most reliable accounts of Lindbergh’s progress posted in front of the Paris Matin offices. “Not since the armistice of 1918,” observed one reporter, “has Paris witnessed a downright demonstration of popular enthusiasm and excitement equal to that displayed by the throngs flocking to the boulevards for news of the American flier, whose personality has captured the hearts of the Parisian multitude.”
Between updates, people waited in anxious silence. Two French fliers—Nungesser and Coli—had not been heard from in the two weeks since their attempt to fly nonstop from Paris to New York; and their disappearance weighed heavily on the Parisians’ minds. Many muttered about the impossibility of accomplishing a nonstop transatlantic crossing, especially alone. Periodically, whispers rustled through the crowd, rumors that Lindbergh had been forced down. After a long silence, a Frenchwoman, dressed in mourning and sitting in a big limousine, wiped away tears of worry. Another woman, selling newspapers, approached her, fighting back her own tears. “You’re right to feel so, madame,” she said. “In such things there is no nationality—he’s some mother’s son.”
Close to nine o’clock, letters four feet tall flashed onto one of the advertising boards. “The crowds grew still, the waiters frozen in place between the café tables,” one witness remembered. “All were watching. Traffic stopped. Then came the cheering message ‘Lindbergh sighted over Cherbourg and the coast of Normandy.’” The crowd burst into bravos. Strangers patted each other on the back and shook hands. Moments later, Paris Matin posted a bulletin in front of its building, confirming the sighting; and bystanders chanted “Vive Lindbergh!” and “Vive l’Américain!” The next hour brought more good news from Deauville, and then Louviers. New arrivals onto the scene all asked the same question: “Est-il arrivé?”
Fifteen thousand others gravitated toward the Étoile, filling the city block that surrounded a hotel because they assumed Lindbergh would be spending the night there. Many too impatient to stand around in town suddenly decided to witness the arrival. Students from the Sorbonne jammed into buses and subways. Thousands more grabbed whatever conveyance remained available, until more than ten thousand cars filled the roads between the city and Le Bourget. Before long, 150,000 people had gathered at the airfield.
A little before ten o’clock, the excited crowd at Le Bourget heard an approaching engine and fell silent. A plane burst through the clouds and landed; but it turned out to be the London Express. Minutes later, as a cool wind blew the stars into view, another roar ripped the air, this time a plane from Strasbourg. Red and gold and green rockets flared overhead, while acetylene searchlights scanned the dark sky. The crowd became restless standing in the chill. Then, “suddenly unmistakeably the sound of an aeroplane … and then to our left a white flash against the black night … and another flash (like a shark darting through water),” recalled Harry Crosby—the American expatriate publisher—who was among the enthusiastic onlookers. “Then nothing. No sound. Suspense. And again a sound, this time somewhere off towards the right. And is it some belated plane or is it Lindbergh? Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field—C’est lui Lindbergh. LINDBERGH!”
On May 21, 1927, at 10:24 P.M., the Spirit of St. Louis landed—having flown 3,614 miles from New York, nonstop, in thirty-three hours, thirty minutes, and thirty seconds. And in that instant, everything changed—for both the pilot and the planet.
THERE WAS NO HOLDING the one hundred fifty thousand people back. Looking out the side of his plane and into the glare of lights, Lindbergh could see only that the entire field ahead was “covered with running figures!” With decades of hindsight, the woman Lindbergh would marry came to understand what that melee actually signified. “Fame—Opportunity—Wealth—and also tragedy & loneliness & frustration rushed at him in those running figures on the field at Le Bourget,” she would later write. “And he is so innocent & unaware.”
Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged—as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony. Just as inevitable, every event in Lindbergh’s first twenty-five years seemed to have conspired in propelling him to Paris that night. As the only child of woefully ill-matched parents, he had tuned out years of discord by withdrawing. He had emerged from his itinerant and isolated adolescence virtually friendless and self-absorbed. A scion of resourceful immigrants, he had grown up a practical dreamer, believing there was nothing he could not do. A distracted student, he had dropped out of college to learn to fly airplanes; and after indulging in the footloose life of barnstorming, he had been drawn to the military. The Army had not only improved his aviation skills but also brought precision to his thinking. He had left the air corps to fly one of the first airmail routes, subjecting himself to some of the roughest weather in the country. Restless, he had lusted for greater challenges, for adventure.
In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called “the single objective of landing my plane at Paris” to have considered its aftermath. “To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford,” he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival.
By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event—almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator—of apparently impeccable character—the new technology found its first superstar.
The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that. Indeed, Harry Crosby felt that the stampede at Le Bourget that night represented nothing less than the start of a new religious movement—“as if all the hands in the world are … trying to touch the new Christ and that the new Cross is the Plane.” Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth.
For several years Lindbergh had lived according to one of the basic laws of aerodynamics—the need to maintain balance. And so, in those figures running toward him, Lindbergh immedia
tely saw inevitable repercussions. At first he feared for his physical safety; over the next few months he worried about his soul. He instinctively knew that submitting himself to the idolatry of the public could strip him of his very identity; and the only preventive he could see was to maintain his privacy. That reluctance to offer himself to the public only increased its desire to possess him—the first of many paradoxes he would encounter in his lifelong effort to restore equilibrium to his world.
“No man before me had commanded such freedom of movement over earth,” Lindbergh would write of his historic flight. Ironically, that freedom would be denied him thereafter on land. Both whetting and sating the public’s appetite for every morsel about him, the press broke every rule of professional ethics in covering Lindbergh. They often ran with unverified stories, sometimes stories they had made up, transforming him into a character worthy of the Arabian Nights. Reporters stalked him constantly—almost fatally on several occasions—making him their first human quarry, stripping him of his rights to privacy as no public figure had ever been before. Over the century, others would reach this new stratum of celebrity.
The unwanted fame all but guaranteed an isolated adulthood. And, indeed, Lindbergh spent the rest of his life in flight, searching for islands of tranquility. Early on, he was was lucky enough to meet Anne Morrow, Ambassador Dwight Morrow’s shy daughter, who craved solitude as much as he did. They fell in love and married. Their “storybook romance,” as the press always presented it, was, in fact, a complex case history of control and repression, filled with joy and passion and grief and rage. He scourged his wife into becoming an independent woman; and, in so doing, he helped create an important feminist voice—a popular diarist who also wrote one of the most beloved volumes of the century, and another that was one of the most despised.
The Lindberghs’ love story had a tragic second act. His fame and wealth cost them their firstborn child. Under melodramatic conditions, Lindbergh authorized payment of a large ransom to a mysterious man in a graveyard; but he did not get his son in return. The subsequent investigation of the kidnapping uncovered only circumstantial evidence; and the man accused of killing “the Lindbergh Baby” never confessed—thus condemning the “Crime of the Century” to eternal debate. Because the victim’s father was so celebrated, the case entered the annals of history, and laws were changed in Lindbergh’s name. The media circus that accompanied what veteran court-watchers still refer to as the “Trial of the Century” forever affected trial coverage in the United States. The subsequent flood of sympathy for Lindbergh only enhanced his public profile, making him further prey for the media as well as other criminals and maniacs. In fear and disgust, he moved to Europe, where for a time he became one of America’s most effective unofficial ambassadors. Several visits to Germany in the 1930s—during which he inspected the Luftwaffe and also received a medal from Hitler—called his politics into question. He returned to the United States to warn the nation of Germany’s insuperable strength in the impending European war, then to spearhead the American isolationist movement. As the leading spokesman for the controversial organization known as America First, he preached his beliefs with messianic fervor, incurring the wrath of many, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt. By December 7, 1941, many Americans considered him nothing short of satanic—not just a defeatist but an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi traitor.