Castlehom Chronicles

Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Broodmare

When Charles Lindbergh returned to the United States after making his historic solo flight from New York to Paris, he was both a hero and the biggest celebrity in the world. In the weeks and months that followed, Lindbergh received over 100,000 telegrams and cables of congratulations and adulation from citizens of all walks of life. Among these telegrams were numerous proposals of marriage. The 25-year-old Lindbergh had never given the prospect of marriage serious thought as he pursued his other endeavors. "I had always taken for granted that someday I would marry and have a family of my own, but I had not thought much about it. In fact, I had never been enough interested in any girl to ask her to go on a date," he wrote in "Autobiography of Values." It was against his nature to carry on like a footloose playboy. If he was to fall in love, he would do so in his own reserved fashion. He (Lindbergh) would evaluate a prospective bride in a calculating and scientific fashion. How was her health? Was she of good physical standing? Lindbergh believed that mating involved "the most important choice of one’s life. One mates not only with an individual, but also with that individual’s environment and ancestry."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born to the purple, June 22, 1906 in Englewood, New Jersey, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the daughter of businessman, ambassador, and U.S. Senator Dwight Morrow and poet and women’s education advocate Elizabeth Cutter Morrow. Her family spent summers at the seashore: Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod and later on the island of North Haven off the coast of Maine. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College in 1928, and married Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., on May 27, 1929.

She had six children. — Charles A., III (deceased, 1932), Jon, Land, Anne (deceased, 1993), Scott and Reeve. Much time during the early years of the Lindberghs’ marriage was spent flying. Anne served as her husband’s co-pilot, navigator and radio operator on history-making explorations, charting potential air routes for commercial airlines. She was crew. They made air surveys across the continent and in the Caribbean to pioneer Pan American’s air mail service. In 1931, they journeyed, in a single-engine airplane, over uncharted routes from Canada and Alaska to Japan and China, which she chronicled in her first book, North to the Orient. They then completed, in the same single-engine Lockheed "Sirius," a five-and-one-half-month, 30,000-mile survey of North and South Atlantic air routes in 1933 (the subject of Anne Lindbergh’s book, Listen! the Wind). Charles characterized this expedition as more difficult and hazardous than his epic New York-to-Paris flight in 1927 in the "Spirit of St. Louis."

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In addition to North to the Orient and Listen! the Wind, Anne Lindbergh is the author of 11 other published books. They include Earth Shine, in which she wrote of being at Cape Kennedy for the first moon-orbiting flight and how that Apollo 8 flight and the pictures it sent back of Earth gave humankind "a new sense of Earth’s richness and beauty;" The Steep Ascent, a novel that tells the story of a perilous flight made by a husband and wife; the inspirational and widely read Gift from the Sea, perhaps her best-known work; and five volumes of diaries and letters from the years 1922-1944.

Smith College, Amherst College, the University of Rochester and Gustavus Adolphus College have all presented honorary degrees to Mrs. Lindbergh. In addition, she has also been inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey. She is also a recipient of the Christopher Award for the fifth volume of her diaries, War Within and Without.

Anne never stopped writing, besides the big hits like Gift from the Sea, a series of autobiographical essays on the nonfiction best-seller list for weeks there was a book of poems, Unicorn and other Poems, 1935-1955. A novel, Dearly Beloved: A Theme and Variations, was published in 1962. By the early 1970s she had begun to edit and publish her voluminous letters and diaries. After Bring Me a Unicorn in 1972, she published four more volumes: Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973); Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974); The Flower and the Nettle (1976); and War Within and Without (1980). Altogether, two thousand pages of Anne’s diaries and letters have been published. As one critic has observed, "Anne’s works are unified by one theme, or rather one dilemma, namely, that ‘eternal struggle’ of ‘what I must be for Charles and what I must be for myself’."

Though (as typical) he never showed it, Charles was hurt by Anne’s 3-year affair in her early 50’s with her personal doctor. This may have led to the fact that from 1957 until his death in 1974, Charles had an affair with a Bavarian woman 24 years his junior, whom he supported financially. The affair was kept secret, and only in 2003, after Anne and the mistress were both dead, did DNA testing prove that Charles had fathered the mistress’s three children. One child came to suspect that Lindbergh was their father and made her suspicions public, after finding among her dead mother’s effects snapshots of, and letters from, Charles. He is also suspected of having fathered children by a sister of his Bavarian mistress, and by his personal secretary.

All this may have contributed to the stoic character of Anne’s later life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh died in 2001, as did Brigitte Hesshaimer.