A pilot doesn’t feel at home in a plane until he’s flown it for thousands of miles. At first it’s like moving into a new house.
—Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (1953)
On Monday, February 21, 1916, the fourteen-year-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh was excused from school. The tenth grader had something more important to do than attend his classes at Sidwell Friends—the exclusive private school, then located on I Street in northwest Washington, D.C. (and which, over the past century, has educated numerous presidential offspring, including the two Obama girls). At ten o’clock that morning, the adolescent had an appointment at the White House with the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.
The future international celebrity, who would often meet with heads of state after becoming the first pilot to cross the Atlantic in 1927, had not yet done anything of note. He was tagging along with his father, Charles August Lindbergh, called “C.A.” by the family, a fifth-term representative from Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. To pass on some gifts from a Native American—a few velvet pillows for Mr. Wilson and a pair of moccasins for Mrs. Wilson—the Republican congressman had managed to book a minute of the president’s time.
This was not the first time that the young Charles would see a president in the flesh. At Union Station, the boy, who by the late 1930s would himself be considered presidential timber (and whose hypothetical defeat of FDR in the election of 1940 Philip Roth explored in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America), had once spotted Theodore Roosevelt sitting in the backseat of a limousine. In Rock Creek Park, he had stumbled upon William Howard Taft taking a stroll behind his horse-drawn carriage. “In Washington,” as Lindbergh later recalled in his Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis (published on September 14, 1953, the same day as Kinsey’s female survey), “one lived with famous figures, saw history in the making.”
Home was then a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse where he shared a bedroom with his mother, Evangeline; his father maintained a separate residence. Though his parents could not stand each other, they could not divorce on account of the congressman’s political career. The young Charles was constantly shuttling from one temporary way station to the next; over the next few years, he would attend four other high schools. From his birth until the fall of 1920, when he started college, he would live at nearly two dozen different addresses.
At nine thirty, the Native American, a man named Mr. Lyons, appeared, and off the trio went to the White House.
A half hour later, looking over at Congressman Lindbergh, President Wilson stated, “The gifts are beautiful. I am delighted to receive them. Mrs. Wilson will also be pleased.”
At that moment, C. A. Lindbergh introduced his son.
“How are you?” asked the president, as he shook the adolescent’s hand.
“Very well, thank you,” responded Charles.
And that was it. President Wilson got back to thinking about the nation’s affairs; that evening, he would confer with three top congressional leaders on how to handle the “Lusitania Crisis,” the foreign policy mess that had resulted from the sinking of a British ship by a German submarine a year earlier and was about to lead to U.S. involvement in the Great War.
After Charles returned to the boardinghouse, his mother peppered him with questions about the events of the day. When asked how he felt about meeting the president, the normally reticent boy blurted out, “It didn’t faze me any because the president is just a man, even if he is president.”
Being just a man would not satisfy Charles Augustus Lindbergh; from boyhood on, he wanted to be a superman. For this fiercely ambitious loner, who, as his father once put it, never had much interest in “things on earth,” the presidency would not be a lofty enough goal. To chase his dreams, he would head for the heavens. “The very fact of flying,” he once wrote, “denied old concepts of impossibility.” For his extraordinary derring-do, he succeeded in becoming the most famous person on the planet in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
As a pilot flying during an age when there was no air traffic to control, Lindbergh would enjoy hovering alone over the world like God himself. “I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics on the ground,” he once observed. “In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing.” A fawning press corps would agree that the svelte, six-foot, three-inch, blond and blue-eyed aviator possessed divine powers. “Lindbergh is no ordinary man,” observed the Sunday Express after his historic achievement. “He is the stuff heroes are made of. He defied death and…dazzles the world.”
Lindbergh would never stop attempting larger-than-life deeds. Soon after returning from Paris, he became determined to conquer time itself. “If a man could learn to fly,” he wondered, “why could he not learn to live forever?” Throughout the 1930s, Lindbergh worked closely with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a physician who had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, on various scientific experiments in the hope of making his dream of eternal life a reality.
And in the 1950s, he began engaging in sexual exploits that few mere mortals could even contemplate. To follow his outsized libido, this father of six children with Anne Morrow—the couple’s first, Charles Augustus Jr., murdered at the age of twenty months in the “crime of the century” in 1932, was followed by Jon, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve—would disappear from his family for months at a time. Taking on a Superman-like alias, Careu Kent, he started three new European families. Unbeknownst to his wife (and to A. Scott Berg, who penned the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1998 biography authorized by her), for the last two decades of his life, Lindbergh would regularly visit his three German mistresses, with whom he would sire a total of seven more children, on “love trips” to Europe. “Only an obsessive-compulsive person like my father could have managed to keep these three families secret,” his youngest child, the writer Reeve Lindbergh, told me. And he of the preternatural sexual appetite also squeezed in his fun. In the 1960s, Lindbergh also arranged trysts all over the world with his steady American girlfriend, a blonde and blue-eyed Pan Am stewardess forty years his junior. Moreover, during his trips to Africa and Asia on behalf of environmental nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund, the sexagenarian had numerous flings with young locals. “When I was a teenager, my grandfather used to tell us [the family] that he would sleep with the oldest woman in the tribe whenever he went to Kenya,” Kristina Lindbergh, his eldest grandchild, said to me in a recent interview. “We didn’t think much of it at the time. Given what we know now, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some more relatives.”
Like Kinsey, Lindbergh viewed sex in purely mechanistic terms. For this high-flier, women were machines whose services he could use every now and then, rather than fellow human beings with whom he could build intimate relationships. This pattern had roots in his boyhood, when, to escape loneliness, he gravitated not toward bugs, as did Kinsey, but toward the inanimate. At ten, he became infatuated with the “new member of the family,” the Model T that his mother christened “Maria” (pronounced “Mariah”). A year later, though his feet could still barely reach the gas pedal, the boy was already a more able driver than either parent. “Maria,” he later mused, “brought modern science to our home, and nothing else attracted me as much.” In 1914, he used it to chauffeur C.A. during his congressional campaign. “While I wanted very much to have my father win,” Lindbergh later recalled, “my primary interest [was]…to be with him and drive Maria.” Charles and “Maria” were inseparable; he often sat beside her, making notes in a logbook he kept about her performance. In his senior year of high school in his native Minnesota, he ogled not girls but the latest gadgets in the local hardware store window. At the University of Wisconsin, the painfully shy engineering student “preferred to ride my motorcycle…[than to take on] the additional problem of women.” And in We, the bestselling quickie book completed after his return from Paris, he told the love story between him and his plane. “The Spirit of St. Louis,” he wrote, “is…like a living creature, gliding along smoothly, happily.…We shared our experiences together, each feeling beauty, life, and death as keenly, each dependent on the other’s loyalty. We have made this flight across the ocean, not I or it.”
After the socially awkward aviator became a celebrity, he finally turned his attention to what he called “my girl-meeting project.” For the world’s most eligible bachelor, looking for the perfect wife resembled designing an exquisite new machine. “The physical characteristics I wanted in a woman,” he later wrote, “were not difficult to describe—good health, good form, good sight and hearing. Such qualities could be outlined like the specifications for an airplane. I wanted to marry a girl who liked flying.”
In October 1928, at the age of twenty-six, he went out on his first date, which naturally took place in the air. A year earlier, President Calvin Coolidge had introduced him to the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Now Lindbergh took his daughter Anne for a spin around Long Island in a small, open-cockpit biplane. Anne passed the test with flying colors; she had no trouble steering and gave every indication that she would evolve into an exceptional copilot (which she, in fact, did). A few days later, Lindbergh invited her on a less consequential “ground date.” While driving her home, he proposed. Stunned, Anne initially demurred, responding, “You must be kidding! You don’t know me.”
“Oh, I do know you,” the smitten aviator protested. (In the decades to come, his motor would continue to rev up quickly.) Then, without further ado, came the requisite flying lessons; the wedding took place in May 1929. “At first, my mother believed his awkwardness was rooted in his Midwestern simplicity,” Reeve Lindbergh explained to me.
In the early years of the marriage, Anne’s rivals were of the mechanized variety. In March 1933, on the first anniversary of the kidnapping of Charles Jr. and right after the birth of Jon, with Anne at his side, Lindbergh took off on a nine-month trip around the world. Repeatedly ignoring and humiliating his wife—in front of a friend who was putting them up for the night, he once dragged her to bed by the ear—he was more interested in spending quality time with his specially designed Lockheed Sirius, Tingmissartoq (Eskimo for “he who flies like a big bird”), than with her. For the engineering geek, one of the highlights of this expedition was the night in Scotland that he spent fixing the plane’s broken cable during a cold rainstorm.
Lindbergh and his wife would live in houses in beautiful settings all over the world—in suburban New Jersey and Connecticut, England, France, Switzerland, and Hawaii—but he rarely stayed home. After the birth of each of their children, he took to the air, leaving his family for a long trip. In fact, Lindbergh spent more hours in some of the Jennys—the World War I–era planes that he flew in the early 1920s—than in some of those homes. “Charles,” a family friend has stated, “was only interested in houses so that he’d have a place to ‘park’ Anne and the children.” By the 1950s, when his piloting days were over, he took to flying around the globe in “tourist class”—he received a nominal consulting fee from Pan Am for conducting inspections—to escape from his various human entanglements. As if he were still flying on a monoplane like The Spirit of St. Louis, he liked to travel light. Refusing to check any baggage, he would carry a trench coat draped around his briefcase, which contained just two nylon wash-and-wear shirts along with two pairs of trousers, underwear, and socks.
But while Lindbergh’s severe interpersonal anxiety would wreak havoc on his family—in the 1950s, Anne, confused and infuriated by her husband’s erratic behavior and prolonged absences, went into a deep depression for which she sought psychoanalytic relief—it turned out to be essential in cementing his legend. Before Lindbergh, pilots were reluctant to try to win the $25,000 prize offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris without a copilot, as they worried about their ability to man flight controls for more than thirty hours. In contrast, Lindbergh was more nervous about sitting that long in close proximity to another human being. “By flying alone,” he wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis, “I’ve gained in…freedom. My movements weren’t restricted by someone else’s temperament, health or knowledge.… I’ve not been enmeshed in petty quarreling and heavy organizational problems.” For Lindbergh, human relationships would always be synonymous with Sturm und Drang. But by removing from his plane the weight of what he considered nonessentials, such as another passenger as well as a radio, the Lone Eagle increased its fuel capacity. As it turned out, the “two-ton flying gas tank” was exactly what “Lucky Lindy” needed to survive—the two-man crews were crashing left and right—and to march directly into the history books.
A couple of months after the minute with President Wilson, C. A. Lindbergh pulled his son out of school again. The congressman was seeking the Republican nomination for senator, and he needed his trusty chauffeur to drive him to his speeches during the spring campaign.
Catching the train in Washington on Saturday, April 22, 1916, father and son arrived in Minneapolis at 7 a.m. on Monday the twenty-fourth. Their first order of business was to pick up the family’s new car, having recently sold off Charles’s beloved Maria, which, due to its hand crank, was no longer state-of-the-art. At his son’s suggestion, C.A. decided to purchase a self-starting Saxon Six. When they arrived at the Saxon store, the salesman, as Charles recorded in his diary, “took me to a side street and taught me to run the car. The Saxon he said was the best car he ever rode in.” Over the next several weeks, Charles drove his father, who ran on an antiwar platform, some three thousand miles around the state. In the primary held on June 19, C.A. Lindbergh, who had decided to give up his House seat, suffered a crushing defeat, finishing a distant fourth. He would throw his hat into the ring a few more times—running in a gubernatorial primary in 1918 and another Senate primary in 1923—but he never came close to holding elective office again. After a series of business ventures failed, he was reduced to living in flophouses. “I am at my rope’s end,” he wrote to Charles in 1921, “for I can sell nothing.” When he died of a brain tumor in 1924, he was nearly destitute.
This was not the first time that a Lindbergh’s political career ended in despair. C. A. Lindbergh’s father, Ola Mansson, born in 1808 in Skåne, a province in southern Sweden, had served a dozen years in the Swedish Parliament before being caught embezzling money from the Bank of Sweden. Just as Mansson lost his seat in Parliament, his wife—and the mother of his eight children—discovered that he had taken up with a mistress nearly thirty years his junior. The product of this illicit liaison, C.A. was born in Stockholm in 1858. The following year, abandoning his Swedish family, Mansson immigrated with his lover and infant son to America. After settling on a Minnesota farm and renaming himself August Lindbergh (an amalgam of the Swedish words for “linden tree” and “mountain”), he would father five more children with his common-law wife. Though Charles Lindbergh, like his father, would never learn all the details about August Lindbergh’s checkered history, he would follow in his footsteps. He, too, would establish families on both sides of the Atlantic (though the aviator would start by siring children in America rather than in Europe). And in 1958, exactly a century after the birth of C.A., a German woman slightly more than half Charles Lindbergh’s age would bring into the world the first of his seven illegitimate European children.
After finishing law school at the University of Michigan in 1883, C. A. Lindbergh settled in Little Falls, Minnesota, a small town on the Mississippi River located in the middle of the state. The six-footer with the dimpled chin—a feature shared by his son—was considered by many to be “the handsomest man in Little Falls.” In 1887, C.A., who had built a thriving law practice as well as an extensive real estate business, married Mary LaFond, an attractive young woman born on the Minnesota frontier who was the daughter of his landlord. She died a decade later, leaving him with two daughters, Lillian and Eva. In 1900, the forty-two-year-old widower began wooing Evangeline Lodge Land, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan. The daughter of Charles Land, a Detroit dentist and inventor, and Evangeline Lodge, this chemistry major, once known as “the most beautiful girl at Ann Arbor,” had just arrived in Little Falls to take up a position as a schoolteacher. While Evangeline Land was bright, she was subject to violent mood swings. Rage attacks would alternate with periods of extreme detachment, for which she would later earn the nickname “Stone Face.” Of her erratic behavior, her stepdaughter Eva would once muse, “Only insanity explains it.” As Charles later put it, his mother had a “flashy Irish temper” and was “often unpredictable.” A case in point: in December 1900, Evangeline refused to teach in her drafty fifth-floor classroom and moved some laboratory equipment downstairs. When the superintendent told her that to do so was to violate school regulations, she walked out on the spot, never to return. Not long after tying the knot in March 1901, C.A. and Evangeline, along with the two daughters from his first marriage, moved into a new three-story, thirteen-room house on a 120-acre estate in Little Falls. Charles, the couple’s only child, was born in February 1902.
Charles Lindbergh’s earliest memory was of a devastating trauma. On the morning of August 6, 1905, Lindholm Manor, as Evangeline dubbed the “dream house” that C.A. had built for her, suddenly caught fire. After being rushed down the steps, Charles saw a huge cloud of smoke; his nurse told him not to look back. “Where is my father—my mother?” the terrified three-year-old then yelled to her. “What will happen to my toys?” While no one perished, his family was never the same. C.A. built a new house upon the same foundation, but the next iteration was just one and a half stories. Gone were the cook, maid, and nurse who had slept in the servants’ quarters on the third floor of the old house. Having recently moved out of the master bedroom, C.A. was no longer willing to invest much in the marriage.
While Lindbergh’s father was more stable than his mother, his old man was also no joy to be around. Before her wedding, Evangeline had wondered if C.A. might be “a bit too sharp-witted,” and these concerns turned out to be well grounded. Described by contemporaries as “austere,” “severe,” and “eccentric,” and by one biographer as “sadistic,” C.A. could not stop denigrating his nearest and dearest. “I do not tell people when I am pleased,” he once wrote to his daughter Eva. “I tell them when I am not pleased.” Not averse to slapping his wife, C.A. once slimed her as “a bloodsucker” within earshot of the boy, whom he would repeatedly berate with epithets such as “fool.” And like his father (and his son), C.A. was a womanizer. At times, Evangeline’s fury nearly devolved into violence. She once grabbed a gun and held it to her husband’s head, threatening to shoot. After C.A. was elected to Congress in 1906, the couple worked out their informal separation agreement. “I would rather be dead a hundred times [than live with her],” C.A. once wrote to his daughter Eva. In order for Charles to maintain some kind of relationship with his father, he would attend school in Washington and go back to the Minnesota farm only in the summer.
While Charles would later insist that he had enjoyed an idyllic Tom Sawyer–like childhood, his early behavior suggests the presence of deep emotional wounds. With his two high-maintenance parents engaged in a perpetual cold war, the boy kept looking for order and comfort wherever he could find it. For emotional sustenance, he turned to nature. In the rebuilt Minnesota house, Charles developed a fondness for the screened-in sleeping porch in the back that overlooked the roaring Mississippi River. A decade and a half before hopping into his first plane, he had already found a home in the sky. He often slept on a cot in this “bedroom,” even in the Minnesota winter. “I was,” noted the aviator years later, “in close contact with sun, wind, rain, and stars.” Like other hard-core collectors such as Kinsey, he also learned to bond with things rather than people. “As a boy,” he later wrote, “I had collected about everything—stones, butterflies, coins, turtles, cigarette cards, cigar bands, stamps, tin cans, lead pipe, and burned-out electric-light bulbs, among other items.” During his first two decades, Lindbergh’s favorite flesh-and-blood companions were the family’s farm dogs—such as Tody, a dachshund-stretch mongrel, and Spot, a brown-and-white hunting dog—who doubled as his bedmates. He formed few friendships with peers; his mother would have to pay neighborhood boys to play with him. In Washington, his classmates nicknamed the socially obtuse loner “Cheese” (his name sounded like the particularly smelly Dutch Limburger). Obsessed with self-reliance, C.A. tried to convince Charles that he was not missing much. “I have one thing that I take pride in above all others,” C.A. would write to his teenage son, “and that is that you are able to buck the world alone and independent if it was necessary. I love that quality in a person, and especially in you, because it was hardly forced upon you.” But little did the self-absorbed C.A. realize that Charles could not have done otherwise. Adhering to this paternal injunction, Charles Lindbergh would forever view his lack of connection with fellow human beings as an asset to celebrate rather than a source of anguish to mourn. And in solitude, he would always exult.
With his father out of Congress, in the fall of 1917 Charles began his senior year of high school in Little Falls. His father also returned to Minnesota, but he continued to live under a separate roof. The emotionally needy Evangeline now treated Charles as if he were her husband and confidant rather than her son. At fifteen, he ran the household. The precocious Mr. Fix-It threw himself into both winterizing and mechanizing the farm. He built a well in the basement for which he did all the plumbing himself. He also constructed a concrete duck pond, which he named “Moo Pond” after the Ojibway term for “dirt”—the neatnik was keenly aware that “a duck pond would almost always be dirty”—as well as a suspension bridge out of barbed wire. He began breeding a variety of animals including Guernsey cattle, Shropshire sheep, and Toulouse geese, which he sold in Minneapolis. The small farm became one of the most high-tech affairs in the area. Charles ordered a three-wheeled tractor from LaCrosse, which he assembled himself, and installed a souped-up Empire Milking Machine, which he also marketed to other farmers. Charles preferred managing the farm to attending his classes; only physics and mechanical drawing were of any interest. Unwilling to do any homework, he nearly flunked out. “I was,” he later recalled, “rescued by World War I.” In early 1918, with food in short supply, the principal announced that students could get academic credit for farmwork. That final semester, Charles made only one more trip to school—to pick up his diploma on June 5. After the armistice was signed in November 1918, he gradually turned the farm back over to tenants and started thinking about college. “It was a difficult and rather heartbreaking procedure giving up the stock and machinery,” he later wrote. Like Kinsey, as an adolescent Lindbergh had developed close ties to his farm’s animals and gadgets, but not to his parents or to any other human beings.
In the fall of 1920, Lindbergh jumped on his motorcycle—a twin-cylinder Excelsior—and drove the 350 miles to Madison, Wisconsin. He selected the University of Wisconsin less for its impressive engineering school than for the lakes near campus. As he later explained, “I could not be happy living long away from water.” Psychologically fused with her son, Evangeline could not abide the thought of losing her longtime roommate; she had already taken the train to Madison to find them an apartment. This unusual living arrangement had the neighbors whispering about what had brought the apparently unmarried middle-aged woman and the dashing college student together. Once again, Lindbergh refused to do even the minimum to stay afloat academically. He barely passed most classes, and he failed English. On a freshman essay, “An Ideal Student,” in which he preached the “fundamentals of hygiene,” his instructor gave him an F, commenting, “Again, some excellent touches, but marred by an irritating profusion of mechanical errors. Please arrange for a conference at once.” (He ignored the request.) Extracurricular activities—the ROTC program and the rifle and pistol teams—were all that he cared about. “I was on academic probation when I entered my sophomore year,” he later wrote. “So I decided to leave the university before I received official notification to do so.”
In March 1922, he fled to Lincoln, Nebraska, to begin flying school. Reacting like a jilted lover, his mother was nearly speechless. “Il est très difficile,” she wrote to him in her broken French—though college-educated, she was no foreign language whiz—right after his departure, “de viver [sic] [live] dans cet ‘flat’ mais très necessaire. Il est aussi très difficile d’exprimer mes sentiments so I’ll not try to.” Evangeline, who began inundating (and embarrassing) her son with daily letters, would not let go easily. “There has been no word from you for 2 weeks and 2 days,” she stated a few years later in a missive, in which she threatened a visit unless he wrote back right away, “and you have not written me for 2 weeks and 5 days—exact reckoning.” Only by taking to the air would Lindbergh manage to gain his freedom from his overbearing mother.
For the next couple of years, he eked out a living as a stunt pilot, entertaining the public in more than seven hundred barnstorming flights. In March 1924, to get his hands on higher-performing planes, the technophile enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the flight training program in San Antonio, Texas, Lindbergh was in his element. “Military training,” he later recalled, “taught me precision and the perfection of flying techniques.” Relishing his courses in aerodynamics, meteorology, and bombing methods, the college dropout metamorphosed into a stellar student. “For the first time in my experience,” he later wrote, “school and life became both rationally and emotionally connected.” The following March, Lindbergh graduated first in his class—he had been one of 104 entering students—and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.
But in the Army, “Slim,” as the 145-pound cadet was called, still could not make a friend. His main way to connect with others was to choreograph practical jokes, and he specialized not in the harmless—say, dropping toothpaste into a snoring mouth—but in the sadistic. To unnerve a soldier sleeping in the buff, who boasted about nights with prostitutes in San Antonio’s “Spick Town”—such racist vernacular was common in the 1920s—Lindbergh devised a startling contrapasso. “I suggested,” he noted proudly more than forty years after the fact, “that we paint the penis green.” And he did not stop there. To ensure a rude awakening, Lindbergh also had the erect member lassoed with some string, which he then hooked up to the ceiling while another soldier tugged on it from outside the barracks.
After moving to St. Louis in the fall of 1925 to run airmail routes for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, this envious virgin, too shy to get anywhere near a nubile woman, was still taunting fellow pilots who pursued sexual adventures. Lindbergh would not allow a roommate, Phil Love, to talk on the phone to his girlfriend—he would make a racket by crashing pots and pans—and every time Love went out on a date, Lindbergh would stick frogs or lizards in his bed. And he almost killed another roommate, Bud Gurney, who, after a night on the town, took a couple of gulps from a water jug into which Lindbergh had poured kerosene. In his last few months in St. Louis, “Slim” lived alone, as no one would dare room with him anymore.
“I’ll organize a flight to Paris!”
Lindbergh later recalled in his memoir that the idea first came to him in September 1926, as he was high up in the moonlit sky, en route from Peoria to Chicago.
Five months earlier, Robertson’s chief pilot had inaugurated its airmail route—the second in the nation—which went from St. Louis to Chicago via Springfield and Peoria. On the afternoon of April 15, 1926, a crowd of a couple hundred had given Lindbergh (along with the two pilots whom he had hired to work under him) a grand send-off, which was widely covered by the press. “We pilots…all felt,” he later wrote, “that we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era.” But within a few months, the monotony of the task—the contract called for five round-trips a week between St. Louis and Chicago—was leaving him feeling apathetic and restless. He and his team had mastered the challenge of boring through the night sky, completing more than 99 percent of their scheduled flights.
As he looked down at the lights on farmhouses on the outskirts of Peoria, Lindbergh kept turning over in his mind the crash in New York a few days earlier of a Paris-bound flight piloted by the Frenchman René Fonck, which had killed two of his three crew members. Fonck’s three-engine Sikorsky biplane, he was certain, had been doomed by its weight. As he approached Ottawa, Illinois—about ninety miles from Chicago—he began fantasizing about a sexy new biplane, the Wright-Bellanca, and its efficiency. “In a Bellanca filled with fuel tanks,” he speculated from the cockpit of his old World War I Army plane, “I could fly on all night like the moon.”
Getting up at daybreak the next morning, Lindbergh flew back to St. Louis. As soon as he returned to his boardinghouse near Lambert Field, located in farmland ten miles northwest of the business district, he thought through the steps that he would have to take to get to Paris. So he took out a pad and began making lists.
For Lindbergh, travel and list making were already intimately connected. A few years earlier, he had compiled an exhaustive set of lists documenting all the trips he had taken as a child, which he then plotted on a massive map of the United States, color-coordinated by his means of transportation. In 1913, he and his mother had boarded the Colon, a second-class boat, which took them to Panama. Besides the train treks to Washington and Detroit (where he visited his grandparents), he also recorded various automobile excursions, such as a forty-day slog with his mother to California—he did the driving—in the Saxon Six in 1916.
For his new venture, he came up with seven lists: “Action,” “Advantages,” “Results,” “Co-operation,” “Equipment,” “Maps,” and “Landmarks.”
The lists reveal the nature of the man, who was all about practicality and efficiency. Each of the numbered points below the headings contained just a few words. “Action” was the longest list, with eight, which included such items as “2. Propaganda” (publicity), “3. Backers,” and “8. Advertising.” Having managed the family farm, the twenty-four-year-old was already well versed in the ways of the business world. Under “Advantages,” after writing that he would promote interest in aviation in both St. Louis and the nation as a whole, he let a bit of his personal passion seep in; in point 5, the lifelong machine lover noted how the flight would “demonstrate perfection of modern equipment.” “Results” was the shortest list, with just two points: “1. Successful completion,” which, as he jotted down, meant “winning $25,000 prize to cover expenses,” and its polar opposite, “2. Complete failure,” about which he chose not to elaborate.
“That…will do for a start,” Lindbergh later wrote of his own reaction to this initial set of lists. “I’ll add to it, improve it, and clarify it as time passes.” Thus would his nervous tic propel him across the Atlantic the following May. Out of his lists of his equipment and flying procedures, which he would constantly check and recheck on this and every other flight he would ever take, would later also come the safety checklist. As Reeve Lindbergh has noted, this legacy of her “obsessively meticulous” father, which has saved the lives of countless pilots, may have been even more important than his historic flight.
A few weeks later, Lindbergh called his first potential backer, Earl A. Thompson, a wealthy St. Louis insurance executive, to whom he had given flying lessons. Offered the choice between a meeting at his office or at his home at 1 Hortense Place, Lindbergh opted for the latter. But after a maid escorted him into the living room, Lindbergh had second thoughts. As he later described the scene, “I don’t seem to fit into a city parlor. It would be easier to talk on the flying field.”
Away from his workplace, which to him felt homier than the magnate’s mansion, Lindbergh lost his self-confidence. Ticking off the items on his “Advantages” list, he mentioned to Thompson that a flight to Paris “would show people what airplanes can do.” While the evening was not a disaster—Thompson remained interested—Lindbergh was unable to pry any cash from him.
But Lindbergh had better luck a few days later with Albert Lambert, the former Olympic golfer and aviation aficionado—Orville Wright had taught him to fly—whom he visited at his office rather than at his Hortense Place home (which was located next door to Thompson’s). Lambert, whose day job was running his family’s pharmaceutical company, promised one thousand dollars. “I feel that my New York–to–Paris flight is emerging from the stage of dreams, Lindbergh thought as he drove back to the field in his secondhand Ford. "I have an organization under way.
Like other obsessives, Lindbergh was clueless about how to handle intimate relationships, but he did develop a knack for networking with the powerful. This lover of propriety also learned how to dress for success. That fall, he shelled out $100 to buy a “traveling outfit,” which consisted of seven sartorial items including a silk scarf and felt hat for which, Lindbergh conceded, he “didn’t have the slightest use.” But the right impression, he realized, “may be as essential for my Paris flight as a plane.” He soon assembled a team of investors that also featured Bill Robertson, his boss; Harry Knight, a stockbroker and the president of the St. Louis Flying Club; and Harold Bixby, a bigwig at the State National Bank and the president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. These men all believed in Lindbergh and his lofty aspirations for aviation. Promising that they would handle the finances, they told him to worry only about the technical details of the flight. The man who was used to going it alone was deeply moved. “I went to them hoping only for financial aid,” he later wrote, “and…I…found real partners in the venture.”
With the dollars secured, Lindbergh tried to acquire the Wright-Bellanca that he had long lusted after. Over the next few months, dressed in his elegant new togs, he made three trips to Manhattan to visit with the plane’s Italian-born designer, Giuseppe Bellanca. While Lindbergh was quoted a reasonable price—$15,000—Bellanca’s business partner insisted on “managing the flight to Paris” and selecting the two-man crew. These conditions were deal breakers. Since the Wright-Bellanca was the only off-the-shelf product that could do the trick, Lindbergh was forced to put his own engineering skills to the test. This setback, he soon realized, turned out to have a silver lining. “Every part of [the new plane],” he noted, “can be designed for a single purpose.… I can inspect each detail before it’s covered with fabric.” In the end, he would control everything to do with The Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh was not only its pilot, but also its father; the first of his many children would be a machine. And like Pygmalion, he would fall in love with his own creation.
On Tuesday, February 22, 1927, racing against the clock—several other pilots were also finalizing plans to make the first transoceanic flight—Lindbergh boarded a train to San Diego to meet the management team of Ryan Airlines. Soon after his arrival, Lindbergh and Donald Hall, Ryan’s chief engineer, squirreled themselves away in the company’s huge drafting room. As Lindbergh rattled off the requirements for his dream machine, Hall sketched. When asked where to put the cockpits for the pilot and his navigator, Lindbergh responded, “I’ve thought about it a great deal.… I’d rather have extra gasoline than an extra man.” Though surprised, Hall immediately understood that this specification would mean a shorter fuselage. Ryan’s CEO then also got on board, and a deal was consummated. For just $10,580, Lindbergh could expect his plane within two months.
Staying in San Diego, Lindbergh supervised Hall’s every move. He devised a list of three principles to guide the plane’s construction—“efficiency in flight,” “protection in a crack-up,” and “pilot comfort.” He told Hall, “I don’t see why cockpit in the rear doesn’t cover all three.” The conscientious Hall, who would put in eighty-hour weeks (and once worked thirty-six hours straight), would come to depend on Lindbergh’s judgment. The pilot spent part of every day at the Ryan plant, looking over Hall’s shoulder; Lindbergh was also busy compiling and checking the lists in his little black notebook in which he kept track of the maps, weather information—particularly wind currents—and landmarks that he would need to study. In the third week of April, with his plane nearly completed, he purchased the twelve items on his emergency equipment list, including his Armbrust cup, which could convert his breath into drinking water, an air raft, and five cans of Army emergency rations (chocolatelike bars).
Lindbergh then churned out a new series of to-do lists for each of the four cities his plane was to be in—San Diego, St. Louis, New York, and Paris. With his anxiety mounting, these lists had a robotic quality; they referred to items that he was unlikely to forget. Under “N.Y. Take-Off,” he mentioned the need to notify the papers and cable St. Louis and San Diego. “Paris Arrival” also covered just the basics plus a reminder to cable his mother. He had no list for “Paris Take-Off.” “I…concentrated so intensely on the preparation and execution of the flight,” he later wrote, “that I had thought little about what I would do after landing.”
On May 20, 1927, at 7:52 a.m., The Spirit of St. Louis took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island. Exactly thirty-three hours, thirty minutes, and twenty-nine and eight-tenths seconds later, Lindbergh landed in Le Bourget Airport in Paris. The pilot was stunned when nearly 150,000 “cheering French,” as the New York Times noted the next day in its banner headline, greeted him and began carrying him off the field. Amid the frenzy, Lindbergh kept worrying about the welfare of his beloved traveling companion. “Are there any mechanics here?” he shouted to no avail. “I was afraid,” he later wrote, “that The Spirit of St. Louis might be seriously injured.” French officials whisked Lindbergh away to a big hangar, where the American ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick, congratulated him. Herrick, who would laud Lindbergh in the foreword to We as “an example of American idealism, character and conduct,” offered the pilot shelter at his elegant residence at no. 2, Avenue d’Iena. Though Lindbergh was exhausted—he also had not slept his last night in New York—he insisted on seeing The Spirit of St. Louis before turning in. After a careful inspection, he discovered “that a few hours of work would make my plane air-worthy again.” A relieved Lindbergh then stepped into the Renault, which took him to the ambassador’s mansion by the Seine. After slipping into borrowed pajamas in the blue-and-gold guest bedroom, he provided laconic answers to the questions posed by reporters while sipping milk and munching on a roll. At last, at 4:15 a.m., he fell into the arms of Morpheus.
When Lindbergh awoke a little after noon on Sunday, May 22, 1927, he was already a luminary known throughout the world. The front page of newspapers in countless countries carried news of little else. That afternoon, he stepped out onto the balcony to wave to those who had been gathering below for hours, chanting, “Vive Lindbergh! Vive l’Amérique!” His privacy was a thing of the past. “If I had gone around the block,” he later noted, “I would have been leading a parade.” The hero was in constant demand. Decked out in a new tuxedo made by a Paris tailor, he shuttled from one ceremonial function to the next, collecting awards and gifts. On May 23, the French president, Gaston Doumergue, gave him the Cross of the Legion of Honor—the nation’s highest civilian honor. But despite all the plaudits, separation anxiety continued to gnaw at him. “I did not have time,” Lindbergh later lamented, “to be with my Spirit of St. Louis.” On Saturday, May 28, he could finally escape from the social whirl by going back to his favorite refuge—his plane’s cockpit. Lindbergh circled over Paris before heading off to Belgium and England for visits with royalty. And then he stepped aboard the USS Memphis, which President Calvin Coolidge had assigned to haul the aviator and his plane back to Washington, D.C. While Lindbergh preferred to fly—he felt uncomfortable about “bind[ing] my silver wings into a box”—he chose not to disobey the president’s directives.
The nonstop feting of the man and his machine would continue for nearly a year. Upon disembarking in the nation’s capital on June 11, Lindbergh was reunited with his mother in the backseat of President Coolidge’s touring car; with a quarter of a million people looking on, the president promoted him to colonel of the United States Reserve Corps. Two days later, on “Lindbergh Day,” the financial markets were closed and four million New Yorkers lined the streets of downtown Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade. In July, Lindbergh took The Spirit of St. Louis on a victory tour to all forty-eight states. Over the next three months, he would ride in 1,300 miles of motorcades and be glimpsed by one-quarter of America’s 120 million citizens. At the end of 1927, Time’s first “Man of the Year” flew his alter ego to a half dozen countries in Central and South America. On April 30, 1928, after completing a final four-and-a-half-hour flight from Lambert Airport, Lindbergh officially handed over The Spirit of St. Louis to the Smithsonian Institution, where it has safely remained ever since.
While Lindbergh smiled at the adoring crowds, inwardly he seethed. Like Kinsey, he hated engaging in small talk with his fans, or with just about anyone else. Fame did not make connecting any easier or more enjoyable. A quarter century later, when the author John P. Marquand—Lindbergh had gotten to know the bestselling novelist because Anne was a close friend of his wife, Adelaide—suggested that he go on a tour to promote his autobiography, Lindbergh responded that he could not do it. “I thoroughly dislike such things,” he wrote, “and feel they are mostly a waste of time and life. I fulfilled a lifetime’s obligations along these lines in the year or two following my flight to Paris.… I have the hope of never going to a big dinner party again.” The Lone Eagle would always be a loner. Even Marquand, whose home Lindbergh visited on numerous occasions, found him “pretty tough to converse with as he does not understand the light approach to anything.”
During their ten-minute chat at York House in late May 1927, the Prince of Wales—later King Edward VIII—asked Lindbergh about his plans for the future. “Keep on flying” was his response.
But not long after his marriage, aviation, as he later wrote, went from “a primary to a secondary interest.” With the task of mapping out air routes for Trans World Airlines (TWA) not proving to be an adequate match for his grandiosity, he soon turned his attention to the mysteries of life and death. By the early 1930s, like Kinsey a half continent away, Lindbergh would switch obsessions; and his new all-consuming pursuit would be in the same field from which Kinsey was retreating—biology.
This was a return to an interest that he had abandoned when he took up flying. Ever since stumbling upon a dead horse in Little Falls, the farm boy had been fascinated by what “stopped life from living.” Inspired by several Detroit relatives who had made significant contributions to medicine and science, he had once toyed with the idea of becoming a physician. But while the indifferent student did not feel capable of handling the academic grind, the world-famous aviator held no such reservations; now supremely self-confident, Lindbergh was convinced that he could do anything if he only put his mind to it. In 1928, he began devouring medical textbooks. The following year, he treated himself to a sleek, new gadget—a high-powered binocular microscope—and began fantasizing about building his own laboratory. After moving with his new wife into a farmhouse near Princeton, New Jersey, Lindbergh got permission from Princeton University’s president to spend time at its labs. On one visit to campus, he observed the reactions of a decerebrate cat which, as he later noted, “seemed to…demonstrate the basically mechanistic qualities of life.” For Lindbergh, the fact that a cat could still eat, see, and claw without most of its brain raised existential questions. The man who attached more readily to machines than to people wondered exactly what it was that differentiated the two. “Certainly,” he speculated, “a decerebrate human would manifest similar reactions.”
Biology might have remained a hobby for Lindbergh, had not a medical crisis struck the family. In 1930, Anne’s elder sister, Elisabeth, whose mitral valve had been damaged during a bout of rheumatic fever, suffered a heart attack. She was just twenty-six, and the prognosis was grim. (She would die just four years later.) From the perspective of the onetime engineering student, his sister-in-law’s “engine” was malfunctioning, and he did not understand why a surgeon could not take it out and fix it (while a temporary pump kept her going) or put in a new “artificial heart” to replace it. Not sure how to answer his questions, a New Jersey doctor directed him to an expert, Dr. Alexis Carrel, an experimental surgeon.
On November 28, 1930, Lindbergh drove in to Manhattan to meet the fifty-seven-year-old French émigré at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Still just twenty-eight and at the height of his fame, Lindbergh towered over the short, squat, and balding Carrel, then widely considered the world’s top scientist. After listening sympathetically while Lindbergh detailed his mechanical solution to his sister-in-law’s health woes, his host mentioned that he had long been interested in developing artificial organs. At present, Carrel explained, the risk of infection precluded the insertion of a pump to replace the heart. But taken by Lindbergh’s curiosity, Carrel gave him a tour around his fifth-floor lab. Lindbergh got a chance to view up close the Frenchman’s most famous experiment, begun in January 1912, in which he kept tissue from a chick’s embryonic heart alive in a small flask. “These results showed that the permanent life [of tissues],” Carrel reported later that year in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, “was not impossible.” After eighteen years, as an impressed Lindbergh observed while peering through a microscope, these chick heart cells were still alive.
After pointing to a sink, where Lindbergh scrubbed his face and hands with disinfectant soap, Carrel escorted his visitor up a spiral staircase to the black operating suite in the attic. Black was the operative word. It was the color of the paint covering the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the operating table, and the cabinets. And the surgeons and staff all wore black robes and hoods, and their specially sterilized instruments were covered in black rubber sheets and towels. According to Carrel, his favorite color cut down on glare, and the black outfits, by highlighting dust, were easier to keep spotless. For this biologist, Louis Pasteur, the father of germ theory, was not just a towering icon but also a patron saint.
Carrel proceeded to show Lindbergh his various attempts to keep the thyroids of cats, dogs, and chickens alive outside the body by means of a glass perfusion pump. As the Frenchman conceded, his gizmos invariably failed to prevent infections. “I was as impressed by the perfection of Carrel’s biological techniques,” Lindbergh later recalled, “as I was astounded by the crudeness of the apparatuses I inspected.” The aviator then offered to help him design a better pump. It was a perfect match. Giving the new volunteer his own key to the black kingdom, Carrel would describe their relationship as “the marriage of [Lindbergh’s] mechanical genius with my scientific research.” Of Carrel, who soon became a mentor, Lindbergh later wrote, “there seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought.”
By early 1931, Lindbergh was commuting four times a week from New Jersey to his “secret” Manhattan office—he refused to tell the inquisitive press what he was doing—sometimes staying until the wee hours. “The moment I entered the black-walled room,” Lindbergh later observed, “I felt outside the world men ordinarily lived in.” Like the sky (and later his European love nests), this escape hatch insulated Lindbergh from the angst of quotidian existence. For this product of two volatile parents, regular contact with others in the ordinary world—particularly, his own wife and children—would prove nearly unbearable. While unstructured domesticity could increase his anxiety, “the precision of trained efficiency” that permeated Carrel’s aseptic workplace could mitigate it. The man who longed to get all the little things right enjoyed studying “every detail of his operating procedures in an attempt to make my designs conform to them.” Lindbergh also burned some midnight oil looking through Carrel’s microscopes. One night, he examined his own semen, which he described as “thousands of living beings, each one of them myself…capable of spreading my existence throughout the human race.” (As Lindbergh aged, his interest in finding receptacles for his seeds would not let up.) As Anne recorded in her diary, she had “never seen him as happy as when he was working quietly there.”
Within a few months, Lindbergh had designed a tilting-coil pump, which allowed a chick’s carotid artery to survive for a few days before succumbing to infection. After this significant first step, Lindbergh worked on increasing the power of his instrument so that it could perfuse a whole mammal organ. Over the next few years—despite a hectic schedule, which kept him in the air for long periods of time—he would continue to sketch new versions. “[Lindbergh] is…very obstinate and tenacious,” Carrel would later tell the New York Times, “so that he does not admit defeat.” At Carrel’s urging, Lindbergh returned to the lab just a couple of weeks after his firstborn’s body was found. As a fellow obsessive, Carrel sensed that immersion in painstaking scientific research might boost the aviator’s spirits, a hypothesis that turned out to be true. In April 1935, the engineering school dropout completed his high-tech three-chamber glass pump, which was able to keep alive a cat’s thyroid for weeks at a time. Soon about one thousand different animal organs—hearts, lungs, livers, and spleens—had been kept alive for up to thirty days in “Lindbergh pumps.” In June 1935, Lindbergh and his boss summarized their preliminary findings in an article for Science, which they began expanding into a book entitled The Culture of Organs. Shortly after its publication in June 1938, when Lindbergh and Carrel were living on neighboring islands off the coast of France, Time put both men on its cover above a caption that read, “They are looking for the fountain of age.” That same month, the New York Times heralded their development of “medical engineering,” which the paper called as “of as much importance in the progress of medicine as Pasteur’s discoveries.”
But just as Carrel and Lindbergh were gaining worldwide attention for the fruits of their eight-year collaboration, politics intruded. From the beginning, their shared love of black hoods and efficiency had gone hand in hand with fantasies of racial betterment. And with Hitler now both committing unspeakable acts against Jews and readying his war machine, the public suddenly lost its appetite for the latest findings of “the men in black,” as Time referred to the two celebrity scientists in its cover story. Antidemocratic to the core, Carrel wanted to replace “liberty, equality, and fraternity” with “science, authority, and order.” In 1935, he had espoused eugenics in a pseudo-philosophical screed, Man, the Unknown. Translated into twenty languages, the blockbuster would sell more than two million copies. Going far beyond his standard praise for Pasteur and his longtime cause célèbre, “cleanliness,” Carrel now promoted racial hygiene. He argued that “a genetic elite” should control human affairs and that the weak, the criminal, and the insane should be “disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with the proper gases.” His interest in artificial organs was inextricably linked with his goal of “remaking man.” “The development of the human personality,” he wrote, “is the ultimate purpose of civilization.” Carrel’s theories were in lockstep with the policies of the Nazi government, which in July 1933—just six months after Hitler’s election as chancellor—passed a law requiring the sterilization of all Germans alleged to be suffering from genetic disorders. In fact, in 1936, Carrel added a few lines to the German translation of his bestseller in which he praised the Nazis for taking “energetic measures against the propagation of retarded individuals, mental patients, and criminals.”
Due to his mechanistic view of human nature—which, given his obsessive temperament, he felt needed to be controlled—Lindbergh was easily seduced by the erudite Frenchman’s twisted utopian vision. For years, he had nodded approvingly as Carrel expatiated on his crackpot sociology in their frequent conversations in the black halls of the Rockefeller Institute. And like his revered teacher, Lindbergh was receptive to vast chunks of Nazi ideology. These Teutonic sympathies only intensified after Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe at the end of 1935 to elude the hounding by the American press corps.
From his farmhouse outside of London, which he rented from the renowned Bloomsbury writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Lindbergh conducted diplomatic missions to Germany at the behest of the United States Army. In the summer of 1936, Major Truman Smith sent Lindbergh to Berlin to report on the state of German aviation. As usual, he would focus more on the machines than on the mammals in his midst. Blind to the cruelty of the recently passed “Nuremberg laws,” which deprived Jews of their rights as citizens, Lindbergh praised the “organized vitality of Germany” that was busy creating “new factories, airfields and research laboratories.” He attended the 1936 Berlin Olympics as the special guest of Hermann Goering, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man. To Carrel, he described Germany as “the most interesting place in the world today,” adding, “Some of the things I see here encourage me greatly.” While he didn’t celebrate the virulent anti-Semitism, it didn’t bother him, either.
In October 1938, at a stag dinner—wives were verboten—at the American embassy in Berlin, Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, an award speckled with four miniature swastikas that had been commissioned by the Fuehrer himself. A horrified American press corps would vilify Lindbergh for not returning the medal, but a week later, the appreciative aviator wrote to Goering, asking him to “convey my thanks to the Reichschancellor.” More entranced by Germany than ever, Lindbergh planned a move to its capital, Berlin. But after Kristalnacht —the pogrom of November 9, 1938, in which thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, hundreds of Jewish shops and synagogues destroyed, and dozens of Jews killed—the Lindberghs put that notion on hold. “I do not understand,” a puzzled Lindbergh wrote in his diary a few days later, “these riots on the part of the Germans. It seems so contrary to their sense of order.” Like other obsessives, Lindbergh was often hyperrational; disconnected from his own emotions (and those of everyone else), he had no idea that the Nazis’ love of order masked their pathological aggression. The couple ended up choosing Paris instead. As Anne explained in her diary, they did not “want to make a move which would seem to support the German actions in regard to the Jews.” Nevertheless, as Time reported in December 1938, what was “once the most heroic living name in the U.S.” was now hated by a considerable swath of Americans. Paying deference to this wave of “anti-Lindberghism,” TWA stopped calling itself “the Lindbergh line” in its advertisements.
As 1938 wound down, Lindbergh tossed in his black scientific hat, ending his experiments with Carrel. “Why spend time on biological experiments,” he later wrote, “when our very civilization was at stake, when one of history’s great cataclysms impended?” But while he no longer thought about how to prevent bacteria from infecting the organs in his pump, he kept worrying about abstract threats to racial purity. Moving back across the Atlantic to Long Island in the spring of 1939, Lindbergh began doing everything in his power to keep his country out of war with Germany. While nonintervention was popular among Americans of all political stripes, Lindbergh’s rationale was curious at best and extremely naïve, if not downright delusional at worst. Not long after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Lindbergh, recycling the racist doubletalk that he had honed with Carrel, explained his position in “Aviation, Geography and Race,” an article for Reader’s Digest. “We, the heirs of European culture,” he declared, “are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race.” Ignoring Germany’s obvious bellicosity, Lindbergh insisted that England, France, and America should all cozy up to the Nazis. According to Lindbergh, who would keep on airing his Teutonic-friendly views in a series of high-profile addresses, this “peace among Western nations” would, in turn, provide protection against the real enemy—the Mongrels, Persians, and Moors.
After Germany attacked France and Britain, the aviator told a stunned congressional committee that he did not believe it was necessarily in the best interests of the United States for England to defeat the Germans. As the public face of the America First Committee, an antiwar coalition established in September 1940 by a group of Yale law students including future president Gerald Ford and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, Lindbergh emerged as the most influential opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pro-British foreign policy. During an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941, Lindbergh blasted American Jews, making sensational claims about “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.” Even more alarming, he declared that “leaders of both the British and Jewish races…for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in this war.” Lindbergh’s speech was immediately denounced by dozens of prominent Americans, including Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger in the 1940 presidential election, who called it “the most un-American talk made in my time.” A week later, Luther Patrick, a Republican congressman from Alabama, waved a copy of Mein Kampf on the floor of the House, saying “it sounds just like Charles A. Lindbergh.” The America First Committee did not dissociate itself from Lindbergh, but simply urged him to stop attacking the Jews. A few months later, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the organization folded, ending Lindbergh’s brief flirtation with politics. “Now that we are at war,” he wrote in his diary on December 12, 1941, “I want to do my part.”
In January 1942, the thirty-nine-year-old went to Washington to ask Secretary of War Henry Stimson if he could assist the Army Air Corps. With several cabinet members opposed—in a memo to President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described Lindbergh as “a ruthless and conscious fascist motivated by…a contempt for democracy”—the administration quickly rejected his offer. “What you say about Lindbergh,” the president wrote to Ickes, “and the potential danger of the man, I agree with wholeheartedly.”
Lindbergh turned to the private sector, testing planes first for the Ford Motor Company and then for United Aircraft; this second gig took him to the Pacific theater, where he flew on dozens of combat missions as a “technical advisor.” Itching to get into the action, he eventually persuaded the Marines to ignore the limits of his official duties and let him dive-bomb enemy positions. “Lindbergh was indefatigable,” recalled Colonel Charles MacDonald, the commander of “Satan’s Angels,” the acclaimed 475th Fighter Group. “He flew more missions than was normally expected of a regular combat pilot.” He also taught the fighters of the 475th various ingenious ways to conserve fuel, which allowed them to extend their missions much deeper into enemy territory. Back up in the air, Lindbergh was doing what he did best.
Like Carrel, Lindbergh would have been much better off had he not strayed from his forte and ventured into social philosophy and politics. The aviator understood what made machines tick, but not human beings, much less nations. While it seemed as if he were taking directives from Berlin, his various Teutonic tributes never did amount to treason, as the Roosevelt administration contended. Lindbergh could not have been a good Nazi, even if he had so desired; he lacked the social skills. While he revered organization, he was too much the alienated loner to work within one. (He never would stick to a regular day job in corporate America.) The Lone Eagle’s allegiance was not to National Socialism, but to Isolationism (both upper and lower case). “[My mother] said,” his daughter Reeve wrote in Under a Wing, her moving memoir of growing up Lindbergh, “that the very qualities that made him a success as an aviator doomed him as a politician. Isolationism…was a quintessentially personal characteristic…and a politically hopeless cause.” While Lindbergh never renounced his racist rants, he did succeed in rehabilitating himself by his activities during the war; in fact, to commemorate his admirable service to his country, President Eisenhower would later make him a brigadier general.
In contrast to Lindbergh, Carrel kept pursuing his elitist utopia. In 1941, the surgeon set up a research foundation in Vichy France that was designed to “create a civilization that, like science, will be infinitely perfectible.” After his mentor’s death in 1944, Lindbergh continued to idealize him; decades later, he would call Carrel’s mind “the most stimulating I have ever met.” Their cocreation, the Lindbergh pump, while never leading to immortality per se, would have offspring such as the heart-lung machine, which can keep patients alive during open-heart surgery, and the artificial heart designed by Robert Jarvik in the 1980s. Likewise, contemporary efforts at biomedical engineering—particularly tissue engineering, where scientists create, for example, replacement urinary bladders out of a patient’s own stem cells—can be traced back to “the men in black.”
As he moved away from biology in the late 1930s, Lindbergh urgently sought a new focus for his compulsive energy. He was also on the lookout for new daily companions, which could replace his string of beloved machines—namely, his planes and pumps. The manuscripts that he began toting around in manila envelopes on his worldwide travels would meet both needs. The former engineering student who could not hack freshman English was now determined to become a writer. And his subject would be himself.
Lindbergh’s perfectionism had first driven him into the writing business a decade earlier. A few days after his arrival in Paris, he began collaborating with a New York Times reporter on a book about his famous flight. When shown the galley proofs in late June 1927, he was outraged by the journalist’s looseness with the facts. “It was highly inaccurate,” he later noted, “and out of character. I decided immediately that I would not permit it to be published over my name.” He decided to redo the entire book himself, even though that meant knocking out the forty-thousand-word manuscript in just three weeks in order to meet the deadline. He worked at a furious pace, delighting in the daily tally of his words. “My record for a single day,” he noted proudly, “was thirty five hundred words.” But while both his publisher and the public were more than satisfied with the workmanlike prose of the megaselling We, which eventually earned its novice author more than $250,000, not so Lindbergh. In October 1928, ten days after his first “air date” with Anne Morrow, he admitted to his future wife, the recipient of several writing awards during her days at Smith College, “I wish I could write.” Living up to her literary promise, she would eventually pen thirteen bestsellers, starting with the Number 1 nonfiction book of 1935, North to the Orient, which described her flights with her husband in the early years of their marriage. She would also teach an eager Charles Lindbergh, who copyedited her literary debut, how to use the English language.
In November 1937, following in the footsteps of his wife, who would later publish several volumes of her diaries, Lindbergh began keeping a daily journal. At the time, as Lindbergh later recalled, he was thinking not so much about publication as about keeping “a private record” of his experiences, particularly his meetings with world leaders that his international celebrity had made possible. The following year, he also began a do-over of his do-over, vowing to complete a thorough hour-by-hour account of his trip across the Atlantic “without the pressure of time.” Once again, he was concerned about creating “a record that was accurate.” After discontinuing his diary at the end of the war, he moved full steam ahead on his revamped memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis. Over the next several years, this obsessive would write and write in an attempt to get everything just right. He would end up cranking out six complete drafts, rewriting some sections as many as ten times.
Lindbergh was as persnickety about his writing implements as about his prose. The former airmail pilot wrote his new book with Number 2 pencils, which he sharpened with a penknife, on pads of blue airmail paper. “He liked his erasers green and he chopped them up to specific lengths,” his daughter Reeve told me. He would mark his location at the top of the page; these “geographical positions,” as he later noted, included the Carrels’ home off the coast of France, New Guinea jungles, and air bases in Arabia and Japan. After slaving over his words for a dozen years, he finally summoned the courage to show them to his wife. Anne would help him find his voice, encouraging him to adopt a conversational, yet precise prose style. “She functioned as his first editor, getting him to trim things, particularly the hyperbolic,” added Reeve. And there were many more rounds of tweaks after he placed the book in the hands of his editor at Scribner’s, who insisted that he cut another seventy pages. “He was the most fussy of authors, living or dead,” observed publishing executive Charles Scribner. “He would measure the difference between a semicolon and a colon to make sure each was what it ought to be.”
The result was what Orville Prescott of the New York Times called an “extraordinary experiment in autobiography.” Lindbergh had turned his thirty-three hours in the air into a fast-paced and moving adventure story. Weaving in flashbacks from his past, including scenes from his childhood in Minnesota, Lindbergh conveyed both his thoughts as he headed to Paris as well as what it felt like to fly. While praising “this superb feat of writing,” the Times reviewer did have one peeve: “excessive detail.” And that was after years of slicing and dicing; his original stack of blue sheets was larded with minutiae about aviation mechanics and logistics.
With few critics expecting the middle-aged Lindbergh to pound out a literary masterpiece, rumors circulated that Anne had been his ghost writer. While his remarkable drive had powered his success—in addition to the ubiquitous raves, royalties amounted to $1.5 million—her influence was everywhere. Just as the writers of the 1930s who visited poet Ezra Pound in Italy were said to have attended the “Ezuversity,” this University of Wisconsin dropout could be said to have finished up at the “Annuversity.” “I don’t think Anne will ever understand,” Lindbergh wrote to John Marquand in early 1952, “how much part she has taken in the chapters of The Spirit of St. Louis. She taught me to see as I never did before, even to look back on past experiences.” To Marquand, Lindbergh also mentioned how much he had absorbed by reading the books she left lying around the house as well as her manuscripts. “In the deepest sense,” he added, “[it was] as if a lot of the pages had been done with her own pen.”
Though proud to have completed the definitive account of his flight, Lindbergh was far from done setting the record straight. In the mid-1950s, he immersed himself in another massive autobiographical manuscript, at which he would plug away until his death. Over the next two decades, he produced a thousand typed pages of text as well as another two thousand pages of notes. He continued to go back over key events, eager to fill in new details and draw out new shades of meaning. To organize his mountain of words, he naturally came up with a list, “on writing autobiography,” that outlined six steps, including one that required him to jog his memory to create another list—that of “scattered incidents.” About a third of Lindbergh’s pages would make it into the posthumously published Autobiography of Values (1978). His American mistress, the Pan Am stewardess Adrienne Arnett, was the muse who inspired him to relate his “moral perceptions” in this memoir, which never did quite fly. In this case, his lists seemed to work to his disadvantage. The New York Times called this follow-up memoir “jerky [as it]…sometimes repeats the same episode or point with only variations in emphasis.”
Lindbergh would also study the dozens of books written about him, compiling long lists of factual inaccuracies. His jottings on The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (1959) by historian Kenneth Davis, which his friend publisher William Jovanovich considered “a sympathetic biography,” came to seventy-six typed pages. Like a dissatisfied moviegoer yelling back at the screen, Lindbergh talked back to the text. He did not like the author’s emphasis on his shyness around women as a youth. “I was definitely interested in girls,” he protested, “but never saw one I was sufficiently attracted to date until I saw the girl who became my wife.” Paradoxically, the anti-introspective Lindbergh, who reacted scornfully when Anne or any other family member turned to psychotherapy, did not hesitate to put his biographers on the couch, based solely on what they said about him. “The author of this book,” he wrote of Davis, “gives me the impression of being a confused and unhappy man. It seems to me he is dissatisfied with the world in general, and particularly with himself.”
Enraged with what he perceived to be constant misrepresentations of his character, in 1969, Lindbergh decided to work up his decades-old diary for publication. In the introduction to The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (1970), William Jovanovich, now also his publisher, explained the “exceptional precaution” that “General Lindbergh took…to authenticate the fact that the journals were not rewritten at later times.” Lindbergh passed on the leather-bound diary notebooks first to a transcriber, who, in turn, gave her handwritten pages to a typist. For each subsection—typically containing a week of entries—both secretaries would sign a statement, “It was copied from and carefully checked with the original,” which Lindbergh would then initial. All this cross-checking was spelled out to prove to the world that he had not doctored anything in his text. But while Lindbergh did not add any new words, his emendations were not all cosmetic. Chopping down his manuscript by a third so that it could fit into a thousand-page book, as biographer A. Scott Berg reported, “he intuitively deleted many [of his anti-Semitic comments]. His admiration for Germany’s accomplishments got soft-pedaled.” Ultimately, this autobiographer was less concerned with accuracy than with control; what he sought was the ability to shape his own public image. But even with the effusive odes to the Third Reich removed, the diary did not strike a chord with readers; sales were anemic.
Lindbergh’s concern about the lack of accuracy in reporters’ accounts of his past is almost comic, given that his post–World War II private life was nothing but a string of secrets that he feared might leak out at any moment. Small wonder, then, that he disdained biographers. While he tried to pass himself off as an easygoing suburban family man, he was actually a high-strung sex addict who was spending a huge chunk of his time planning and engaging in his trysts. As with Kinsey, the family homestead—a four-acre plot of land in Darien, Connecticut, that he purchased in 1946—gave some clues to his little-known flip side. The stucco house was surrounded by disorder, except for “pockets of horticultural order here and there,” Reeve Lindbergh has written. Right outside the door stood a young maple tree on the service line of an old tennis court. A wide variety of animals—deer, geese, snakes, and turtles—roamed the “unkempt wildness” of the land. And like Kinsey, Lindbergh also liked to shed garments in his backyard; he would skinny-dip in the nearby Long Island Sound and then lie naked on the beach.
When he was not tending to some project outdoors, Lindbergh squirreled himself away in his office, where he often went into a list-making frenzy. He began compiling lists of nearly everything, including events in his past such as all the planes he had ever flown and all the books he had ever read. And he was constantly updating his own to-do lists, which he divided into three categories, “Current,” “Immediate,” and “Near Future.” In 1963, he downsized his Darien digs, moving from the cavernous Tudor house to a new spartan dwelling, which had no dining room. “As if we were on an airplane, we ate on trays by the fire,” recalled his granddaughter Kristina, who often visited on school vacations.
He stayed with Anne and the children in Darien only a couple of months a year. And whenever he did return home, Lindbergh would invariably terrify them all. “This is a nonbenevolent dictatorship,” he would repeatedly bark out. “He laughed after he said it, but I didn’t,” Reeve has written. “I wasn’t in the mood.”
Lindbergh ruled over his subjects not with an iron fist but with ironclad lists. He demanded that Anne compile and continually update a complex series of household inventories, which documented every article of clothing, book, and kitchen item owned by the family. As per his directive, she also kept track of all her household expenditures, including every fifteen cents she doled out for rubber bands. When Anne did not comply, he got testy. An exasperated Anne was just as likely to find herself retreating to her room to cry when her husband was home as when he was away. And the paterfamilias who insisted on “Father”—“Dad” was verboten—would keep extensive checklists on his children. On a megachart, which had a column devoted to each of the five American Lindberghs, he would jot down—with his trusty Number 2 pencil—all their infractions such as “chewing gum,” “reading comics,” or “leaving shoes out in the rain.” As the no-nos added up, he would summon each child into his office for some discussion and/or a couple of half-hour lectures on, say, “Freedom and Responsibility” or “Downfall of Civilization.” And after the tête-à-tête, he would place the appropriate check marks on his chart, indicating that domestic order had been restored. The children felt otherwise. “I thought,” Reeve has recalled, “my father was, too often, both unfair and absurd.”
By the late 1940s, Anne realized that her husband was incapable of maintaining anything resembling a conventional marriage, but she couldn’t figure out why. As Reeve Lindbergh told me, after his death her mother confessed that she was constantly mulling over divorce in the decade between 1945 and 1955. But this easygoing and thoughtful problem solver eventually decided to accept Lindbergh for what he was. She made the most of her years of psychotherapy with the controversial psychiatrist Dr. John N. Rosen. While this shrink could be even more volatile than her husband—in 1983, Rosen would surrender his medical license when charged with dozens of ethical violations by a Pennsylvania medical board, including, most notably, the verbal, physical, and sexual abuse of hospitalized schizophrenic patients—he proved remarkably helpful with this high-functioning and verbally gifted ambulatory neurotic. Rosen put his finger on exactly what she was up against, explaining that her husband’s “compulsive outward orderliness” was compensating for his “inward disorderliness.” And to solve the existential problem that Lindbergh’s bewildering behavior posed, this introspective writer also turned to words. “My mother wrote her way back into the marriage,” Reeve stated.
Anne’s writing for public consumption evolved into the protofeminist classic Gift from the Sea. Begun in 1950 and released in 1955, this 127-page book of philosophical reflections went on to sell nearly three million copies. “I began these pages for myself,” Anne wrote, “in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.” While her husband’s eccentricity was extreme, the issues that Anne addressed were universal; she explored, for example, how couples inevitably grow apart after the “perfect unity” in the early years of marriage. To cope with such difficult periods in life and love, she advocated simple virtues such as patience and openness; she also stressed the joys to be found in solitude. In private, however, as revealed in Against Wind and Tide (2012), a collection of her letters and diaries from this period, Anne also decided to fight back. “As I read into the 1950s and 1960s and beyond,” noted Reeve, the volume’s editor, in the Introduction, “I recognized the person who had learned to stand up to a man whose good opinion she had once craved above all else.” Avoiding direct confrontation with her husband, “she began to embrace his absences,” Reeve told me. Relishing the chance to carve out her own life, Anne turned to other men to meet her needs for intimacy. Her lovers included Dana Atchley, the family doctor, and Alan Valentine, a prominent academic historian who served for fifteen years as the president of the University of Rochester. Anne stopped straying by the late 1950s, and Lindbergh never learned about these relationships. Though her husband was the sex addict, Anne was the partner who was saddled with the guilt. During her husband’s lifetime, as she later told biographer Scott Berg, Anne suspected that he had been unfaithful, but only once, with a beautiful young Filipina, whose picture he had brought back from one of his trips to Manila in the 1960s. And a few years after his death, as Susan Hertog reported in Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (1999), Anne found love letters from Adrienne Arnett, the stewardess, with whom he carried on an affair between 1966 and 1972; however, she did not stumble upon any other evidence of his extracurricular activities.
It’s not clear exactly when Lindbergh first became a serial adulterer. Hard evidence for any affairs before the mid-1950s is missing. But given his remarkable ability to control other people—with each German mistress, he insisted on a vow of “secrecy,” threatening not to return if it was ever violated—this gap in the historical record doesn’t necessarily mean that his hyperactive sexual self remained dormant until then. We know about his German escapades only because after the death in 2001 of Brigitte Hesshaimer, one of his three German “wives,” her three children, who had discovered about 160 love letters on blue airmail paper sent to their mother by “C.”—the same sign-off that the aviator tended to use in his letters to Anne, who also died in 2001—felt free to reveal the truth. In the summer of 2003, Dyrk Hesshaimer, born in 1958; Astrid Hesshaimer, born in 1960; and David Hesshaimer, born in 1967, announced at an international press conference held in Munich’s Rathaus (town hall) that the famous aviator was their father. A DNA test conducted later that year confirmed their assertion. “At first, I was shocked,” stated Reeve, who has since met and become friendly with all seven European half siblings and their families. “But after a while,” she added, “I felt as if this news explained a great deal. Now I know why he was gone so much. I also understand why he was delighted when I was learning German and why he repeatedly advised me not to sleep with anyone you don’t want to have a child with.”
Lindbergh’s three children with the dark-haired Brigitte Hesshaimer also spoke at length about their famous father to a German journalist, Rudolf Schroeck, with whom they shared the letters. Schroeck’s ensuing book, Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh), appeared in 2005 (it has yet to be translated into English). His four other European children have never spoken publicly. Since the release of this insightful biography, which was widely and positively reviewed in Germany, both Astrid and David Hesshaimer have shunned the media. “All you need to know [about my father’s German families],” David wrote to me in a 2011 e-mail, “is already written in Rudolf Schroeck’s book.” In contrast, their elder brother, Dyrk, who appeared on European TV to promote the book, has occasionally fielded questions from reporters. In the fall of 2012, I became the first American writer to interview any of Lindbergh’s seven German children when I met with Dyrk for four hours in a Munich hotel. He is tall and lanky, speaks fluent English, and has long worked as a software programmer in his native Germany. “Of course, the word double life in the title of the biography,” he told me with a smile, “isn’t quite accurate.”
Schroeck’s book also contains some basic information about Lindbergh’s two other German families. With Marietta Hesshaimer, Brigitte’s sister, who was also dark-haired, he would have two children, Vago, born in 1962, and Christoph, born in 1966. And with a Prussian blonde, whom Schroeck referred to as “Valeska,” he would have two more children—a son born in 1959 and a daughter born in 1961. Seeking privacy, this mistress, who today resides in Baden-Baden, has not revealed her real name nor the first names of her two children. As children, Dyrk, Astrid, and David would often spend summer vacations with their aunt’s two children, but they had no idea that they were actually half siblings rather than cousins.
Lots of people seek out lots of sex, but only a select few start four families, three of which are “secret”; and it is this aspect of Lindbergh’s erotic life that is the most puzzling and puts him in a league of his own. His contemporary Louis Kahn—the influential architect was born a year before Lindbergh and also died in 1974—came close, but he stopped at one wife, two mistresses, and three children—one with each partner. What Kahn, whose story was told in the 2003 documentary, My Architect: A Son’s Journey, and Lindbergh shared was a preference for a nomadic existence, which may have had roots in their chaotic early lives. At three, Kahn also was victimized by a fire—it left permanent scars on his face—and emigrated with his impoverished parents from the Estonian island of Sarema to the United States.
Lindbergh, who had hardly felt connected to his family of origin, may have harbored a deep need for belonging that he did not know how to pursue in any other way. Fathering the children with his German mistresses may also have helped reduce his fears of abandonment by increasing their dependence on him. In contrast to his German lovers (particularly the Hesshaimer sisters, who rarely pushed back against his exacting demands), the American Adrienne Arnett, with whom he did not father a child, repeatedly threatened to throw him out whenever his teasing got out of hand, and she would not let him back into her life until he apologized.
While Valeska was the second of Lindbergh’s German mistresses to bear him a child, he was already intimate with her before he met either of the Hesshaimer sisters. In the mid-1950s, he hired the attractive blonde, twenty-two years his junior, as his translator—he had found her by placing an ad in the Süddeustche Zeitung, Munich’s leading newspaper. Blessed with a perfect command of English, Valeska had been working as a private secretary for Philip Rosenthal Jr., the flamboyant owner of a porcelain manufacturing business in Bavaria, with whom she had also been carrying on an affair. Lindbergh soon began sleeping with her both in Munich and in Rome, where he kept an apartment.
The tragicomic romantic complications, which would eventually require all of his obsessive skills to handle, didn’t ensue until March 1957. That’s when Lindbergh, accompanied by Valeska, paid a visit to a three-room, fifth-floor walk-up at 44 Agnesstrasse in Munich’s Schwabing district, where he was introduced to both Brigitte and Marietta for the first time. The two sisters had been living together there since 1955 (though Marietta was soon to move out). This modest apartment, which its current tenants showed me in the fall of 2012, was where Dyrk was conceived toward the end of 1957 and where he lived until he was six. “My sister Astrid and I used to sleep with my mother in the bedroom,” he stated, “except when my father came to visit; then we were exiled to the living room.” Dyrk also told me of his fond memories of the pancakes that his father used to make in the small kitchen. “He was a good pancake flipper,” Dyrk recalled. Lindbergh used to enjoy eating breakfast with Brigitte and the children on the small porch that jutted out from the living room and overlooked the building’s interior courtyard.
At the time of Lindbergh’s first visit to Agnesstrasse in March 1957, Brigitte—nicknamed “Bitusch”—was a thirty-one-year-old hatmaker and Marietta a thirty-three-year-old painter. Like Lindbergh, Valeska didn’t know the Hesshaimer sisters; she had only recently heard of them through a mutual German friend, Elisabeth, who escorted the former aviator and his secretary to their Schwabing apartment that day. While Brigitte and Marietta were aware that Lindbergh was a married man and already had a mistress—Valeska—they were both instantly taken by the fifty-five-year-old celebrity, who looked much younger than his years. Their attraction to Lindbergh also had roots peculiar to their era. “For my mother’s generation,” Dyrk remarked, “there was a shortage of eligible men, and foreigners who had a second family in Germany were not all that unusual. After all, many German men died in World War II, and those who returned were often tormented.”
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 athlete—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.”
On the morning of Sunday the eighteenth, Lindbergh, lying on a stretcher, arrived at Kennedy Airport, where he was lifted aboard a regularly scheduled United Airlines DC-8 flight, which departed at ten thirty. Accompanying him in the first-class cabin were Anne and his sons, Jon and Scott, who gave him his medicine as they headed west.
As he awoke the next morning in Hana, Lindbergh began compiling a new series of checklists, as he turned his attention to his final journey—the one into the ground.
In the week of life left to him—he died after breakfast on Monday the twenty-sixth—though he would drift in and out of consciousness, Lindbergh kept planning the details of both his funeral services and burial. In the end, he arranged everything. Rejecting Anne’s suggestion of Bach cantatas for his memorial service, which he requested be held a day or two after the burial service, he settled on Hawaiian hymns because, as he told the family, “no one will know what they mean.” While he had hoped that his body would be wrapped in sheets made of pure cotton, he reluctantly agreed to a 50-50 cotton-polyester mix. He even instructed the pallbearers, local day laborers, what to wear, insisting on work clothes.
As if he were back looking over the shoulders of the engineers at Ryan Airlines, Lindbergh helped design both his coffin—one-inch planks of a special type of mahogany were to be used—and his gravesite. He specified the shape and size of the lava rocks that were to surround each side of the fourteen-by-fourteen-by-twelve-foot pit where he—and later Anne—were to be buried. He kept badgering his wife and children about every detail. “Father was obsessed about drainage,” Jon Lindbergh noted.
Today the Lone Eagle still lies alone, as Anne later chose to be cremated rather than to be buried beside her husband.