Читать книгу THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1 - Lise Pearlman - Страница 18

6.

America’s Royal Couple

ON MAY 27, 1929, the family gathered with friends at the Morrow estate in New Jersey, ostensibly for Mrs. Morrow’s fifty-fourth birthday and to celebrate the return of Evangeline Lindbergh from an overseas teaching job. Except for the immediate family, the attendees at the Morrows’ New Jersey home on May 27, 1929, had no idea they would be present at Charles and Anne’s wedding. Even so, the press had gathered outside the gate of the Morrows’ new estate just in case. The engaged couple distracted them with several trips back and forth in street clothes. Likely at Dwight Morrow’s instigation, that morning Charles handwrote a will witnessed by his prospective father-in-law’s secretary and Anne’s sister, Elisabeth Morrow.

The first clue for guests of what they were about to witness occurred when Anne entered the room on her father’s arm wearing a white chiffon wedding dress, lace cap and short veil. She carried a small bouquet from the garden. Lindbergh wore a blue suit. The minister then stepped forward. After a brief ceremony with no music, guests toasted the newlyweds. Lindbergh was asked to slice the wedding fruitcake. Unfamiliar with royal icing, he started hacking at the cake. At first, he made no headway through the sugary casing that created an almost impenetrable seal around the fruitcake. He must have felt someone had pulled a practical joke on him and was far from amused.

Neither Mrs. Morrow nor Anne had thought to look at the directions the specially ordered cake came with. The person cutting the cake needed to use a knife dipped repeatedly in piping hot water. Mrs. Morrow assumed the knife was too dull and offered to get her son-in-law a better knife. She then got the shock of her life. “He grabbed her by the wrist and growled ‘No! No!’ in a tone she had never heard before and would never forget.” Lindbergh stubbornly kept sawing at the icing and managed to finish the task.

The entire ceremony and reception were over in less than half an hour. Anne slipped away from the guests to change into a suit to head off with her groom. She hid on the car’s floor as Lindbergh drove by the throng of reporters at the estate’s entrance. For the time being, they managed to keep the press entirely unaware of what had just taken place or where the two were headed for their honeymoon. Lindbergh had his plane readied for take-off, which fooled the press into heading to the airfield. The subterfuge continued with an exchange of vehicles arranged by Henry Breckinridge. The newlyweds then headed to the Long Island shore where Breckinridge had made sure there was a rowboat available for the couple to reach a thirty-eight-foot motorboat moored nearby.

Anne and Charles managed a few days of quiet motoring as they headed up toward Maine. He let his beard grow and donned grubby pants, a cap and sunglasses to disguise his appearance when he stopped to buy water. But the hunt for the pair was on. Word got out to reporters after they were spotted refueling the boat in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. From that point on, reporters dogged the couple to snag their photographs. Anne felt like “an escaped convict.” Their daily life after the honeymoon remained extraordinarily public. Lindbergh’s focus was on doing aerial surveys and helping organize travel plans for domestic and overseas commercial flights. The airlines he worked for encouraged as much hype of the new industry as possible. That meant extensive travel. On sidewalks or other public places, Anne felt like the two of them were “monkeys in a cage.” She told her younger sister Connie that when speaking to the press she needed to be constantly alert not to reveal “anything at all personal or real.”

When the Lindberghs ventured out they often disguised themselves to go unnoticed. Anne would stick all her hair up beneath her hat, wear goggles and heavy lipstick. Lindbergh had varying looks. He might appear as a poorly dressed country boy or wear his hair greased and parted down the middle, his eyebrows darkened and add a pair of glasses. Once on the way to the theater, Anne got her hair cut to a fashionable bob and wore glasses and lipstick but fooled no one. Her husband left at intermission. Life as celebrities was getting old fast. Newspapers and newsreels featured both men and women aviators, but none as much as the Lindberghs.

Anne missed her diary but kept her promise to her husband not to record any of her thoughts, not even during a week spent on vacation with President Hoover and his wife. Lindbergh’s advisor Henry Breckinridge had already planted the seed in the celebrity pilot’s mind that he, too, could aspire to be President someday. Then, Breckinridge could wield immense national power himself, perhaps as Chief of Staff or in a Cabinet position. Breckinridge likely suggested to Lindbergh that they might target a run in 1940, the first presidential election past Lindbergh’s thirty-fifth birthday — the minimum age the Constitution set for a President. The thought stayed in the back of Lindbergh’s mind, but, unlike his father, politics was not then his passion.

As reporters followed the Lindberghs around from airport to airport, they observed that he did not treat his bride with any noticeable consideration. Though slightly built, she lugged her own gear and boarded and deplaned without any offer of assistance from her spouse. Lindbergh generally acted as if she were just one of the guys. Anne did not want to be scorned for seeking special accommodations or for voicing persistent safety concerns. She remained stoic, stifling any complaints. Her husband at some point built her a ladder for getting in and out of the cockpit.

It was major news in August 1929 when twenty women pilots, including “Lady Lindy” Amelia Earhart, competed in the first, all-female air derby. Several suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning in their open cockpits. One lost consciousness and crashed and died in the Arizona desert. Unlike Earhart, Anne did not yet have an airplane pilot’s license and considered herself simply a novice companion to her extraordinary husband.

Dwight Morrow worried a great deal about his son-in-law taking Anne out on so many risky flights and spending so much money on airplanes and travel. Anne had gained control of a considerable trust fund when she married in May 1929. That September, Dwight Morrow had his attorney prepare a will for Anne stipulating that on her death her estate would go in trust to any children of her marriage. If she had no children before she died, the proceeds of her estate would still not go solely to her husband, but be split equally among Charles, her two sisters and her brother. Morrow’s aim was to ensure his son-in-law could not squander all of Anne’s inheritance on new aircraft. Morrow may have also had concerns that Lindbergh’s lucrative airline deals would not last. He might be a one-trick pony.

Charles was deeply offended. He told his father-in-law he would rather not accept any of the trust fund under those restrictions and asked Anne not to agree to her father’s proposal. Anne did her husband’s bidding. The Morrows then did an end-run around Lindbergh’s objection by removing Anne as trustee and creating a new estate plan for her with the exact same distribution scheme — only without the need for Anne’s signature.

In October, Lindbergh took Anne on a plane trip exploring the Yucatan. Inwardly, Anne yearned for “a home, family life, privacy, a baby.” When the couple returned, they started thinking about a permanent home of their own. Originally, they considered coastal locations. Lindbergh was himself a millionaire by then, but far less wealthy than Dwight Morrow. Morrow’s concerns about his son-in-law’s financial security had to have magnified immensely following the devastating stock market crash in late October. By the following year, reports would surface that Lindbergh was hugely overpaid by Pan American and Transcontinental Airlines for technical advice lacking any substantial value and that he was simply “cash[ing] in on the name of Charles Lindbergh and the almost imbecile adoration of the American public.”