THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

      5.

      Hooked

      AT FIRST, Anne had been irritated to learn that the close-knit family’s Christmas holiday would include entertaining a famous stranger. She feared he would be boorish and put a damper on their activities. To her surprise, she found Lindbergh to be introverted. He seemed extremely young, though he was four years her senior. She noticed that he often withdrew into uncomfortable silence.

      Lindbergh seemed instantly drawn to Elisabeth’s beauty and vivacious personality. Anne wondered why it was that good-looking men inspired her older sister to perform “at her best and always … put me at my worst?” Whenever the Morrows and their guest went out in public, Anne observed that Lindbergh left everyone he met spellbound. She assumed he either symbolized “the most stupendous achievement of our age” or simply exuded “personal magnetism.”

      Soon Evangeline Lindbergh arrived from Detroit via San Antonio with great fanfare — transported to Mexico City in a Ford passenger plane flanked by five smaller planes for escort. The Morrow family greeted her at Valbuena Airport with a huge crowd that had gathered to watch the planes descend. Anne recorded in her diary how thrilled she was at the sight — “the tremendous excitement as of a strong electric current going through you.” Photographers and reporters also mobbed the embassy on their return, shouting “Viva Lindbergh.” Anne confided to her diary, “I can see how they all worship him.”

      Anne felt tongue-tied. She envied her older sister’s conversational skill. During his stay, Lindbergh offered Elisabeth a ride in the three-engine Ford plane that had brought his mother to Mexico City. He extended the invitation to Connie and Anne, his mother, their Aunt Alice Morrow and a Ford engineer. The plane could seat them all strapped into wicker chairs in the cabin.

      Arriving at the airport, Anne found the very sound of airplane motors “intoxicating.” All three Morrow daughters found their modern magic carpet ride thrilling beyond belief. Lindbergh was so sure of himself and relaxed in the air. The lift-off left Anne breathless. She told her diary: “I will not be happy till it happens again.” Elisabeth asked him at lunch if they could all learn to fly, and he encouraged them to get lessons. When Lindbergh departed on December 28 for a goodwill tour of South America, he left the family in awe. Anne later acknowledged that meeting Lindbergh completely altered “my world, my feelings about life and myself.” She now felt that the sky was something open to her to possess as well, like a soaring bird or a winged unicorn.

      When contemplating graduation from high school, Anne had fantasized about marrying a hero. Long after Lindbergh departed, she still felt his glow. Despite knowing she was his intellectual superior and far more sophisticated, Anne found herself magnetically attracted to him. Anne felt she had touched greatness. She thought he exuded “clean-cut freshness … complete absence of falseness … tolerant good humor.” She was beguiled by “his smile, his attitude hands in pocket looking straight at you.” At the same time, Anne realized Lindbergh barely noticed her. Being realistic, she expected him to remain utterly inaccessible to someone like herself.

      Anne soon learned that her father had invited Colonel Lindbergh to join the family again that summer at their vacation home on the island of North Haven, Maine. There, the family and guests relaxed each summer swimming, sailing, and playing golf and tennis. Anne excelled at swimming and tennis. Their estate in New Jersey also boasted a tennis court and pool, but North Haven provided a much-needed respite for Dwight Morrow away from the intensity of Wall Street. Anne envied Elisabeth. She pictured yet another handsome young man falling under her sister’s spell, while Anne stood by like a wall flower. Lindbergh was attracted to Elisabeth’s “sparkling vivacity,” while he barely noticed her younger sister Anne.

      In the spring of 1928, Lindbergh made more headlines that Anne followed with fascination. While finishing up at Smith, she dated college boys who seemed all too commonplace. She resumed her focus in her last semester on classical literature and poetry, a concentration she disparaged as “utterly worthless compared to the world of Elisabeth and Colonel Lindbergh.” Yet an essay and a highly imaginative story she polished that spring won Anne two coveted literary prizes.

      Late in March Anne found herself at the movies in Northampton enthralled by the documentary, “Forty Thousand Miles with Colonel Lindbergh.” It amazed her that she had met the hero of that film. On the way to the American Embassy in Mexico City, Anne and her mother got off the train in St. Louis in hopes of seeing the new Lindbergh exhibit at the Jefferson Memorial Museum, but they arrived too late for entry.

      Anne kept thinking about Lindbergh. He was clearly someone from a different planet. “It is so idiotic to sentimentalize him, to see into his personality things we want to see there — things which could never, never be there. Everyone has made that mistake: he has been made a kind of slop bowl for everyone’s personal dreams and ideals.” Yet she did not heed her own warning. Soon, Anne was exclaiming to her diary that Lindbergh was “the last of the gods.”

      On her way back from Mexico to Smith, Anne studied the handbook, Airmen and Aircraft. Though she had played basketball in high school, she did not believe she had the physical endurance and coordination the book considered indispensable for pilots. She credited herself with excellent vision, but it dismayed her to read that an ideal pilot should have other attributes she considered herself to lack: fearlessness,” “level-headedness at all times,” and “adaptability.”

      In her spare time Anne got her license to drive and fantasized about flying again. She pored over issues of “Popular Aviation” and even wrote a few poems on the subject. In April, Anne and a friend stopped by an airfield near Smith College where Anne peppered an affable pilot with questions and wangled an invitation to sit at a parked plane’s controls so she could try them herself. In early May, Anne talked her friend into going back. Despite heavy winds, a pilot took them up on a bumpy and noisy ride, but as they flew over the college, local hills, fields and neighborhoods, Anne “felt like God.” It was “a shock of revelation, as if one suddenly saw the world upside down.” Anne went up with a pilot twice more that spring, once joined by her sister Elisabeth.

      Meanwhile, Lindbergh continued making front page news with his exploits, dodging reporters ever eager to track his moves. Anne read voraciously any news she could get of him, but still dreaded his visit that summer. She could tell that both her sisters had appealed to him more. She even imagined him marrying Connie in a few years’ time, if he did not propose to Elisabeth.

      In late April 1928, Lindbergh made banner headlines flying to Quebec through a snowstorm with a potentially life-saving antibiotic serum for rival pilot, Floyd Bennett. Bennett had been on his own rescue mission when he came down with a severe case of pneumonia in mid-flight, causing his hospitalization. Racing to Bennett’s aid was just the type of high-risk,