Читать книгу THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1 - Lise Pearlman - Страница 14

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A Secretive Loner in the Spotlight

ON MAY 20,1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off on his unprecedented 33-and-a-half-hour solo flight to Paris from New York, he had little idea that this one journey would make him the object of the greatest media obsession in American history. The timing of his flight, and his ethnic background, made his super-stardom inevitable. “In an age of hedonistic materialism. he had shown courage and self-denial of a high order; in an age of corporations and committees he had acted alone.” To insatiable reporters, Lindbergh’s biography appeared perfect. The pioneering pilot was born on February 4, 1902, just over two years into the twentieth century. He was raised in part on a Minnesota farm at a time when most Americans remained farmers. He represented both the past and the future.

Fans thrived on any news about their hero that they could get their hands on. They learned that the blond, blue-eyed pilot was named for his Scandinavian father, Charles August (“C.A.”) Lindbergh, except C.A.’s wife, Evangeline, spelled her son’s middle name like that of the Roman emperor. Science had transformed the world since C.A.’s boyhood. Lindbergh’s father had labored on a farm without any machinery before becoming a lawyer and Congressman championing farmers and laborers. His only son provided a comforting link between the past agrarian society and an unknown future shaped by new technology. What his worldwide admirers did not know was that Lindbergh “was shy and aloof, and wary, in his dealings with other human beings; he might be more spontaneous and wholehearted in his response to physical objects for the very reason that these did not demand that he respond and were, indeed, utterly indifferent to him.”

Time magazine instituted the category of “Man of the Year” in 1927 and awarded it to the pioneering aviator, dwarfing Yankee Babe Ruth’s mammoth sixty-home-run season. Scores of poems and songs honored “Lucky Lindy.” Jubilant partygoers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds started doing the “Lindy Hop.” Lindbergh was deeply offended. As biographers would later note, throughout his life Lindbergh would regard “most reporters and photographers with intense suspicion and resentment. He … insisted that they twisted his words or quoted them out of context, they took pictures of him and his family at unflattering angles, and their jostling and intrusive flashlights upset him.”

Fans had no idea that the real Charles Lindbergh was far from the heroic figure reporters portrayed. They had no clue about the paralyzing fears Lindbergh had overcome, nor his nasty, antisocial habits or family scandals. Just three years earlier, he had shown up at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Texas, an unknown quantity in a beat-up commercial biplane. The Army Air Service staff greeting new recruits on March 15, 1924, had to be shocked when out popped a cocky college dropout just in time for flight school. Charles “Slim” Lindbergh’s first assignment was to remove that junk heap from the premises.

Pilot training in the 1920s demanded great concentration and skill. Less than a third of the 104 recruits who showed up to boot camp that spring would complete the course. Lindbergh’s brash attitude changed abruptly when he almost flunked out. For the first time in his life he hit his textbooks with a vengeance. By the following spring, Lindbergh became one of just 19 young men who earned their wings. He would be remembered as much for his pranks on the ground as for his superior flying ability.

When given time off, most recruits headed for speakeasies and the local whorehouse. Lindbergh never went along. If he was not holed up with reading assignments, the aloof Midwesterner preferred to spend his free hours on mischief. Historian Kenneth Davis characterized the stunts Lindbergh pulled as “more malicious than humorous.” Learning that a cadet was deathly afraid of snakes, he hid a small, poisonous one in the fellow’s bunk, taking care only that its venom would not be fatal. Another trainee who feared scorpions “might anxiously check his sheets almost every night for a nasty surprise.” One well-endowed recruit who slept naked woke up with a start to find his penis painted green and a string tied to it, which Lindbergh had just convinced another recruit to yank. Those sleeping open-mouthed risked Lindbergh squirting their tongues with “shaving cream or hair grease.”

When the troops gathered outside, Lindbergh created a trick with a sawed-off shotgun shell he placed under a chair and lit with a slow-burning, string fuse. When someone sat down, “the powder whoofed and the smoke shot upward.” Decades later, the world-famous pilot recalled the victims’ shocked reactions at boot camp as “delightful” to watch. At least one fellow pilot somehow found it amusing to recall that Lindbergh also attached a parachute to a dog and threw the poor animal off a hangar roof.

After interviewing men who trained with Lindbergh, Davis concluded: “[Lindbergh’s] taste and talent for this kind of ‘fun’ [would] grow apace … passing beyond the bounds of sport into what, in the eyes of most observers, will appear a realm of crude, cruel aggression.” As biographer Leonard Mosley similarly noted: “Life in the Army stirred Lindbergh’s appetite for practical jokes, and they got rougher as he grew older.”

When reporters quizzed Lindbergh about his personal life, he abruptly cut them off. Historian Kenneth Davis noted that Lindbergh strongly recoiled from “the absurd myth named ‘Lindy’ … his whole existence a melodrama shaped [by other people’s] fantasies. His fame became, in this respect, his mortal enemy … No man had a greater passion for privacy than he.”

One pair of family secrets the aviator was hell-bent on keeping was that his father was illegitimate, and that Lindbergh was not even his family’s original surname. C.A.’s parents had not married until 1885, after they had seven children, C.A. being the first. C.A.’s father, Ola Mansson, had taken the name August Lindbergh when he fled Sweden in 1859 with his 20-year-old mistress Lovisa Jansdotter Carlen, and their baby son.

Mansson had served for more than a decade as secretary for Crown Prince Charles of Sweden before getting caught in a major embezzlement scandal. He fled Stockholm to avoid prosecution. When he assumed a new identity in America, Mansson left behind a wife and seven children, the youngest of whom was just four at the time. Lindbergh never met his grandfather August Lindbergh, but likely learned about the scandals from two of C.A.’s older half-brothers who emigrated to Minnesota from Sweden in the 1860s and spent the rest of their lives in America.

Lindbergh’s family proudly counted themselves of superior stock. As a child, Lindbergh relished the gruesome details of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 that included a massacre of white settlers at New Ulm, Minnesota. Pioneers of his grandfather August Lindbergh’s generation vilified the Sioux to justify their own aggressive takeover of Native American lands. When C.A. Lindbergh was growing up, the frontier had moved West. The Chippewa were peaceful weavers and the Sioux no longer posed a threat. Still, C.A. told his young son, that when no adults were around, he and his friends “would hide in bushes and whoop like savages to frighten [their] sisters and their friends.”

The future pilot’s own earliest memories were from the year he turned three. The summer of 1905, two searing incidents occurred that stuck with the boy for life, and likely fueled his penchant as an adult for destroying the peace of mind of friends and family. His father often swam across the swift currents of the Mississippi River with young Charles on his back, both always stripped naked. One day, the small boy fell off into the rushing river. C.A. continued to shore and watched to see if his son would sink or swim. Luckily, after going under and starting to drown, the little boy managed to thrash himself to safety, shocked to see his father standing on the bank, never having made any effort to come to his son’s aid.

Late on Sunday afternoon, August 6, 1905, came the second emotionally scarring event of Lindbergh’s early childhood. After dinner, the little boy was playing in the parlor. Suddenly, his mother and their servants began screaming. A maid swooped him into her arms and brought him to the barn. The boy was by now greatly upset. He saw plumes of black smoke and tufts of flame coming from a third-floor window. Fire hoses could not reach that level of the house, but neighbors had time to bring out his mother’s cherished piano and most furniture before the house burned to the ground.

To the little boy, the conflagration marked the end of an era. He lost all his toys in the attic. By year’s end, his father suffered severe cash flow problems compounded by taxes assessed on his real estate holdings. The fire helped precipitate the final rift in a deteriorating marriage. His parents’ separation when he was a small child was another well-guarded family secret.

Widower C.A. Lindbergh and Evangeline Lodge Land were mismatched to begin with: a middle-aged, small-town lawyer raised among immigrant farmers in rural Minnesota; and a refined schoolteacher 17 years his junior, whose father was a prominent dentist and inventor in Detroit. C.A. had been quick to propose to 24-year-old Evangeline in the fall of 1900 when they both lived in a rooming house in Little Falls. Evangeline had just arrived to teach high school chemistry. C.A. had a thriving law practice in town with his brother. When he met her, C.A. had just quit living in his townhouse with his judgmental widowed mother and put his two young daughters in boarding school.

C.A. knew the girls were desperate to come back to live with him. Marrying Evangeline would make that possible. C.A. also viewed her as an elegant asset to further his political ambitions. He had rarely met a woman college graduate, let alone one with a prestigious Bachelor of Science and Master’s degree. The attractive brunette came from British, French and Irish stock. She had a beautiful figure, played the piano proficiently and had excellent social skills.

Evangeline’s parents tried to dissuade her, but her father’s recent bankruptcy made her especially concerned about financial security. The sophisticated Land family only met their stubborn Swedish son-in-law at the wedding at their home in March 1901. They found him “hard to approach and eccentric.” Evangeline was at least as difficult in her own way — with a strong temper she likely inherited from her volatile grandmother. The strain on the newlyweds’ relationship began shortly after their only child was conceived on their ten-week honeymoon out West.

Evangeline returned to Detroit for the birth of her son. She was still suffering from postpartum depression when she returned with her baby to Little Falls a month later. Her unhappiness was compounded by her prickly relationship with C.A.’s two daughters, who were closer in age to Evangeline than she was to her husband. Evangeline lashed out at C.A. in front of his family and acquaintances, alienating her Swedish mother-in-law and extended family with her superior airs and uncontrollable mood swings. Her stepdaughters called her “crazy” and claimed that she mistreated the baby. In later years, her daughter-in-law Anne Morrow Lindbergh watched Evangeline behave erratically as well, prompting Anne to conclude that her husband’s mother suffered from a chemical imbalance.

Lindbergh grew up witnessing his mother’s long memory for insults. She never forgave C.A. for guffawing at her when she fell off a galloping horse while riding side saddle because she found that more ladylike, or, on another occasion, when she slipped on winter ice in the town center and every passerby could see her underwear. Her son would exhibit both his father’s juvenile sense of humor and his mother’s thin skin and desire to inflict punishment for insults — real or imagined.

Well before the Lindberghs’ house burned down, C.A. had begun cheating on his wife with a woman who worked in his office. The couple separated for good in 1906. C.A. relocated his principal office to Minneapolis and continued to see his mistress. Evangeline and her young son moved to a hotel in Little Falls and then shared a sparsely furnished room in a boarding house. The four-year-old boy spent a lot of unhappy time “looking out of windows.” Once, he took the landlady’s cat and dropped it out a third-story window “to see if it was true that it would land on its feet.” The experiment worked.

Going forward, Charles alternated spending time alone with each parent as they battled for their son’s loyalty with conflicting demands. Evangeline raised her son to value science. C.A. battled to raise his son to relish his tough, Swedish roots and prepare himself to endure any physical hardship. The couple’s only child would always view himself as one half grounded in nature, the other in science.

The small boy clung to his father when visiting others. One close friend of C.A.’s later commented that his son was so exceedingly shy that it “made contact with other youngsters of his age next to impossible.” His resentful mother reinforced the boy’s isolation. He seldom had other children to play with. She disdained all their neighbors and did her best to avoid interacting with her husband’s extended family.

In 1906, C.A. won a seat in Congress, where he would serve for five terms. Most winters Evangeline and Charles traveled to the nation’s capital where they lived separately from C. A., who had brought his mistress with him to Washington. Yet he and Evangeline kept up appearances by attending official functions together. Their annual charade had to be confusing to their son.

Because of his parents’ frequent moves, the boy wound up attending a dozen different public and private grade schools — none for very long. His mother would have preferred to avoid having her son keep being the awkward new kid in class, but C.A. would not commit to paying for private school over the long term. He felt it built character to attend public schools, getting his son ready for the challenges of life.

With all the disruption in his schooling, Lindbergh fell so far below his grade level he found school painfully humiliating. It made a strong impression on him that his Congressman father had originally found studying as tedious as he did. As a youngster, C.A. had often gone AWOL from school, much preferring “the freedom of the surrounding woods and water.”

Charles spent most of his time in Washington with his mother. She found bitter satisfaction in bad-mouthing her husband for how little money he provided for their support. In front of their son, her husband called her a “blood sucker” and, at least one time, was so enraged he hit her. Evangeline, in turn, ended one shouting match about her husband’s mistress by putting a gun to C.A.’s head. By the summer of 1909, Evangeline sought a divorce. C.A. told his sister he resisted for his son’s sake. He also knew voters would never support a divorced man. Evangeline became persuaded that remaining the wife of a Congressman had some advantages.

Summers in Little Falls were far more to the boy’s liking. C.A. shared with his son a love of solitude. They both enjoyed walking in the primeval forests. Charles and his mother stayed in an uninsulated cabin built on the same site as their former home. The little boy created an “Indian lookout” by nailing cleats into a linden tree and later into a giant red oak tree the height of a six-story building overlooking the Mississippi River. He feared heights but found them irresistible.

Lindbergh’s mother deeply disapproved of C.A.’s reckless attitude toward her only child. Evangeline had long attributed her husband’s “sink or swim” approach to parenthood to his Swedish father, August Lindbergh, who had lost an arm in an accident and kept farming, priding himself for his own “independence and self-reliance.” C.A. taught his son basic survival skills in the wilderness. Growing up among lumbermen, Lindbergh also picked up carpentry skills, which came in handy when left to his own devices. Before he was ten, the resourceful youth had built himself stilts, his own raft, and later, a wagon and a suspension bridge over a nearby creek.

Living mostly apart from his half-sisters, Charles became protective of his mother, despite her detached approach to motherhood. The bedtime ritual was a handshake, not a kiss. Few people other than her immediate family would ever get to know her well. For her son, she would remain practically the only female with whom he had any close relationship at all until he met his wife. Yet he also found making his mother panic highly entertaining. He would later derive similar pleasure taking advantage of opportunities to badly frighten his wife.

As a youth, Charles shivered in fear at night, often waking with a loud cry that prompted his mother to invite him to sleep on her bedroom floor. He was plagued by nightmares filled with unseen dangers: a robber with a dagger, a giant snake. Sometimes he seemed to be plummeting “from a tall cliff or building, plunging helplessly downward, nauseated by fear toward ugly death.” His mother understood. Thunderstorms frightened her. Having her son sleep nearby let them both get through harrowing nights.

By the age of thirteen, Lindbergh had collected a small arsenal at the summer camp. It included his first rifle from Grandfather Land when he was six, another from his father the following year, a shotgun, a pistol, a revolver and a small saluting cannon with blank shells that his mother’s uncle had given him. The weapons gave him a sense of security. Evangeline had by then become so disliked in Little Falls for her superior airs that some local hooligans took to intimidating her on occasion with warning shots. The bullets were fired way over her head as she neared her cottage. Her son then spent considerable time digging a trench by the riverbank, which he concealed with a lengthy mound of dirt in front of it. By the time he made use of his bunker, the mound would be overgrown with grass.

One day, likely in the late summer of 1915, Lindbergh and a friend hauled his weapons down to the bunker to take revenge on a man and several boys across the river who had just fired rifle shots within several feet of Lindbergh’s raft. The group was celebrating its malicious mischief by singing a song about lynching. Lindbergh was quite familiar with “coon songs,” which were hugely popular when he was growing up. He himself had learned from his mother’s younger brother how to use burnt cork to darken his face like white singers then did while performing their racist sets. But the notion that he was the butt of such nasty humor provoked Lindbergh to paddle as fast as he could to shore to run to get his friend Bill Thompson to join him to seek revenge. Thompson was one of the two boys in the neighborhood whom Lindbergh palled around with. The two of them then hauled Lindbergh’s weapons down to the bunker where they unleashed a barrage of fire that barely missed the heads of his harassers.

That fall, probably in retaliation, some unknown sniper killed Lindbergh’s pet dog Dingo. In high school, the shy, gangly youth was not well-known or liked by other students. He was mortified when a teacher asked for his homework and he either had not done it or was ridiculed for a poor effort. He often fought with boys in the class who taunted him but could only “burn with slow anger over the sniggers of the girls.” He did so poorly he was in danger of failing and could not bear to consider how demeaning that would be. Lindbergh lucked out. When the United States joined the Great War in Europe, President Wilson created a program for states to offer school credit for teenagers who took care of the family farm. Life-and-death decisions may have been more unnerving for Lindbergh because of his mother’s penchant for naming many of their farm animals. But with help from his father’s elderly tenant, the teenager designed and built sties with raised floors to keep his sows from accidentally killing their offspring. Veterinarians provided advice on how to euthanize disease-ridden, new-born calves by a heavy blow to the soft spot on their heads. Lindbergh corralled lambs that had gone astray, but then learned the harsh reality that bottle-feeding motherless lambs with cow’s milk took time “you haven’t got to give them.” He could see verified before his eyes what his grandfather Land taught him about Darwin’s law — survival of the fittest.

After grueling workdays, Lindbergh liked to read at night in the kitchen by the light of a kerosene lamp. He scanned headline stories in the Minneapolis Tribune and the Little Falls newspaper and pored over materials on farming. Starting in the winter of 1917, Lindbergh focused on a new serial in Everybody’s Magazine, “Tam o’ the Scoots,” which featured a courageous Royal Flying Corps pilot on the western front.

Lindbergh had first become fascinated with airplanes when he was twelve and his mother took him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C. Born just a year before the Wright Brothers took their first brief flight, Lindbergh would feel drawn throughout his life to the latest machines that pushed the boundaries of human potential. “Science held the key to the mystery of Life; Science was truth; Science was power.”

For several years, Lindbergh’s maternal grandmother had come to stay with Evangeline and her grandson for a month each summer at the camp. But when she took sick with cancer, Mrs. Land started living with them year-round so Evangeline could care for her. Lindbergh remembered her later as a “kindly, quiet woman, wonderful with children.”

With Evangeline and her ailing mother in the two bedrooms, Lindbergh made his bed on the uninsulated porch, burying himself under a pile of blankets. Staring at the starlit sky, Lindbergh remembered to keep his nose exposed, as his father had advised. Otherwise, his habit of pulling the covers over his head might risk tuberculosis — the disease that had cut short the life of his half-sister Lillian. Those winter nights on the below-zero porch helped him develop extraordinary endurance that would later come in handy as a pilot.

For added warmth, he wore his father’s old winter coat to bed and kept his new dog curled up beside him. The terrier was named Wahgoosh — Chippewa for “fox” — and had quickly become the teenager’s constant companion. One day, Wahgoosh went missing. The teenager located his beloved pet bashed to death with a crowbar and dumped in their well — his second dog lost to violence. By 1918, Lindbergh and his mother had made a number of enemies in their rural community who were likely capable of such cruelty.

In October of 1918, the sixteen-year-old saw billowing smoke covering the sky “as though a strange and titanic storm were brewing.” More than fifty years later, he recalled it as “a rather terrifying sight.” That gargantuan fire northeast of the farm turned out to be one of the most devastating in Minnesota’s history. For Lindbergh, the experience likely brought back searing memories of watching his family’s home at the same location burn to the ground when he was three and a half.

After his grandmother Land died of cancer in January 1919, Lindbergh and his mother left Minnesota with its bitter winters for good. Evangeline convinced her son to enroll in an engineering program at Madison, Wisconsin. She obtained a teaching job there, and a cheap apartment for them to share. Lindbergh joined ROTC and became an accomplished marksman. His mother cooked, kept house and ghost-wrote papers for him. Even so, Lindbergh flunked out. He then rode his motorcycle to Nebraska, where he had heard of a chance to apprentice himself at an airline company.

Soon Lindbergh talked his father into paying for an Army surplus “Jenny” biplane so he could eke out a living giving thrill rides at $5 a pop and performing as a barnstormer. C.A. only agreed to buy the plane on the condition that Lindbergh would fly him around Minnesota for a Senate race. After the political campaign failed, C.A. helped get his son into an Army pilot training program but did not live to see him graduate. That May of 1924, C.A. succumbed to a brain tumor during one last quixotic political campaign for governor. At the time, he and his son were estranged, and C.A. had no idea whether his offspring would make anything of his life.