Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were two of the most celebrated Americans of the 20th century — he the aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic, she an acclaimed writer. Their marriage lasted 45 years, until his death, but a new biography shows it was far more strained than the public image suggested.
The book, “Solo and Together: Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an Enigmatic Life and Marriage,” is by James R. Hansen, who also wrote the Neil Armstrong biography “First Man.” Hansen says he wanted to tell the couple’s story without judgment.
“They had a remarkable marriage not because it was ideal but because it was so intensely human,” Hansen said. “And the triumphs and failures in their lives are almost inseparable.”
A romance born of fame
Lindbergh became an instant global celebrity after his 1927 transatlantic flight, at age 25. He soon decided he wanted a wife who could help him escape public attention, and his attention settled on Anne Morrow, then 21, whom he met during a goodwill tour of Mexico in late 1927. Her father, Dwight Morrow, was the American ambassador there.
Anne was immediately drawn to Lindbergh but assumed he preferred her more outgoing older sister, Elisabeth. Back at Smith College, she wrote in her diary that he had “swept out of sight all other men I have ever known.”
Lindbergh called her for a date in October 1928 — a flight over Long Island in a two-seater plane, during which he let her take the controls. The two married in 1929 in a private ceremony at her family’s New Jersey home. Anne later recalled seeing herself at the time as a devoted “page” to Charles’s “knight” — “hardly,” she admitted later, “a good basis for marriage.”
In 1931 Anne trained as a radio operator and navigator and served as Lindbergh’s co-pilot on a three-month survey flight over Canada and Alaska to the Far East. She wrote about the trip in her first book, “North to the Orient,” which won a National Book Award.
Tragedy and a widening gap
In 1932 the couple’s toddler son, Charles Lindbergh Jr., was kidnapped from their home in Hopewell, N.J. His body was found in nearby woods in May of that year; Bruno Hauptmann was later convicted of the murder and executed.
According to Hansen, the tragedy exposed a deep divide in how the two coped. “Charles dealt with the tragedy by trying to control it, control the investigation and by suppressing his emotions,” Hansen said. “Anne needed to grieve, she needed to talk, and Charles responded by building emotional walls.”
The family left the United States to escape media attention, living first in England and later on an island off Brittany. Charles made several trips to Nazi Germany to assess its air power for the U.S. government, praising what he called “the organized vitality” of the country and concluding that no European power could or should challenge its military buildup.
Anne was more alert than Charles to how this would be received at home. After Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering awarded him a medal bearing a swastika, she privately called it “the albatross.” Still, when Lindbergh later joined the America First Committee and gave speeches blaming Jewish groups for pushing the U.S. toward war with Germany, Anne defended him, telling her mother, “Charles stands for integrity.” In 1940 she published a short book, “The Wave of the Future,” arguing fascism wasn’t worth fighting — a position she later disavowed.
Hansen writes that Anne, in defending her husband, never asked “why Charles failed to examine his own prejudices in shaping his view of American’s path — or why she hadn’t examined her own.”
A marriage under new strain
By 1950, Anne — then 44 and the mother of five children, including a daughter born in 1945 — began considering divorce. Charles had spent much of World War II abroad advising the Air Force in the Pacific, where he flew combat missions and shot down a Japanese plane despite his civilian status. After the war he continued to travel for long stretches, leaving Anne to raise their children largely alone in Darien, Conn.
Charles was also a strict, demanding parent, leaving each child a to-do list to finish before he returned home. When Anne began seeing a psychiatrist, he disapproved so strongly that he stopped speaking to her for six months.
Anne later told her daughter Reeve that she had planned to leave Charles once her youngest child turned 10. Her decision to stay was eased, according to the book, by a close relationship with her internist, Dr. Dana Atchley, who likely became her lover for a time. During this period she wrote “Gift From the Sea,” a meditation on solitude and relationships that became an immediate bestseller in 1955 and has since sold three million copies worldwide.
Charles’s own secret life went far further. He began a relationship with his German secretary, Valeska von Arnim, who had a son with him in 1958. Around the same time, he had affairs with two of her friends, sisters Brigitte and Marietta Hesshaimer, ultimately fathering seven children with the three German women. He made regular visits to see them while keeping the arrangement hidden. Hansen believes Anne suspected something. “Anne knew something was up, but she didn’t know what it was, and she really didn’t want to know what it was,” he said.
A final wish honored
When Lindbergh was dying of cancer in 1974, he insisted on returning to the A-frame home he and Anne owned on Maui, despite doctors’ warnings that the trip from his New York hospital bed could kill him. Anne supported the decision. “Going along with how he was and how he wanted everything done, was so typically Anne,” Hansen writes.
Charles arranged for a grave in a Maui church cemetery with space for Anne beside him, but she ultimately chose not to be buried there. After her death in 2001, Anne’s ashes were scattered, as she had requested, across several places she loved, including Maui.
