By any standard, Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh were remarkable figures: he was the celebrated aviator who conquered the Atlantic, while she became an accomplished and widely read author.
Their 45-year marriage, which lasted until Charles’s death, was an extraordinary achievement in its own right. It was hardly a union of perfectly matched minds, yet the couple remained together through triumph, tragedy and profound periods of strain.
“Solo and Together: Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an Enigmatic Life and Marriage” reveals the depth of those difficulties, particularly for the sensitive, introverted Anne as she navigated life with a husband who could be controlling, emotionally distant and fiercely determined.
James R. Hansen, who also wrote “First Man,” his biography of Neil Armstrong, set out to tell the Lindberghs’ shared story without passing judgment.
“They had a remarkable marriage not because it was ideal but because it was so intensely human,” Hansen told The Post. “And the triumphs and failures in their lives are almost inseparable.”
Their relationship began as a storybook romance. Lindbergh became an international celebrity overnight after flying a single-engine plane solo across the Atlantic in May 1927, at the age of 25. He soon decided he wanted a wife—someone with whom he could escape the spotlight and create a home and family. Though many women expressed interest, his thoughts repeatedly returned to Anne Morrow, a quiet and striking 21-year-old he had met during a goodwill tour south of the border over Christmas in 1927.
Anne’s wealthy father, Dwight Morrow, was serving as the American ambassador to Mexico. When she met the tall, handsome pilot in Mexico City, she was immediately captivated, although she assumed Charles was more interested in her vivacious older sister, Elisabeth. Back at Smith College, Anne wrote in her diary: “The idea of this clear, direct, straight boy … has swept out of sight all other men I have ever known, all the pseudo-intellectuals, the sophisticates, the posers.”
She was stunned when Lindbergh telephoned in October 1928 to invite her on a date—one that would take place in the air. While flying over Long Island, he allowed her to take the controls of a two-seat de Havilland Moth. Their early relationship established a pattern that would endure: they were most comfortable and happiest together in the sky.
After several more meetings, Lindbergh asked Anne to marry him. Determined to avoid publicity, the couple wed in the drawing room of the Morrow family mansion in Englewood, New Jersey, with only relatives in attendance. Years later, Anne recalled that people congratulated her for winning “the hero of the hour.” At the time, she viewed herself as a devoted page to Charles’s knight—“hardly,” she later acknowledged, “a good basis for marriage.”
Anne trained as a radio operator and navigator so she could serve as Lindbergh’s co-pilot during a dangerous three-month expedition in 1931. The pair surveyed air routes across Canada and Alaska toward the Far East. Anne later recounted the journey in her first book, “North to the Orient,” which won a National Book Award.
The devastating events of the following year placed their marriage under far greater pressure. In March, their toddler son, Charles Lindbergh Jr., was kidnapped from his nursery at the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey.
“Charles dealt with the tragedy by trying to control it, control the investigation and by suppressing his emotions,” Hansen explained to The Post. But after the boy’s body was found in nearby woods in May, “Anne needed to grieve, she needed to talk, and Charles responded by building emotional walls.”
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Seeking to escape the media frenzy surrounding the investigation and trial of Bruno Hauptmann—who was later convicted of the child’s murder and executed—the Lindberghs left the United States. They lived abroad first in England and later on a remote island off the coast of Brittany. At the request of the US government, Charles traveled to Germany several times to assess the rising strength of Nazi aviation. He praised the country’s “organized vitality” and believed Germany’s military expansion was so formidable that no other European nation could—or should—challenge it.
Anne was much more attuned than Charles to the likely reaction in the United States to his admiration for Nazi Germany. After Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering presented him with a swastika-adorned medal, she quickly named it “the albatross.” Yet when Lindbergh later joined the America First Committee and delivered speeches accusing Jews of weakening the national interest by pressing for US involvement in the war against Germany, Anne defended him. “Charles stands for integrity,” she told her mother, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade her that love had clouded her judgment. In the fall of 1940, Anne published “The Wave of the Future,” a short book she later disavowed, in which she argued that fascism was not worth fighting.
Hansen describes this period as the darkest chapter of their life together after the kidnapping. Writing about Anne’s unwavering defense of her husband, he notes: “What she wasn’t asking was why Charles failed to examine his own prejudices in shaping his view of America’s path—or why she hadn’t examined her own.”
Although the Lindberghs stood together through intense public and private criticism, Anne, by then 44, began considering divorce in 1950. What had changed?
By then, she was raising five children—three sons and two daughters, including Reeve, who was born in 1945. Charles had spent much of the war away from home, advising the Air Force in the South Pacific. Though he remained a civilian, he flew combat missions and shot down a Japanese aircraft. After the war, he continued working in distant parts of the world, leaving Anne alone for months at a time in Darien, Connecticut, where she managed their large family.
“Charles’s frequent absences continued to hurt,” Hansen writes, as did his rigid and sharply critical approach to parenting. Whenever he left, he gave each child a list of tasks and expected everything to be completed before he returned. When Anne began seeing a psychiatrist, Charles strongly objected and stopped speaking to her for six months.
Anne later told Reeve that she planned to leave Charles once her youngest child turned 10. Her decision to remain was eased, however, by her growing bond with Dr. Dana Atchley, her internist—a warm, witty and nonjudgmental man who may have become her lover for a time. During this difficult period, Anne also wrote “Gift From the Sea,” a meditation on solitude, work and human relationships. Published in 1955, it became an immediate bestseller and has since sold three million copies worldwide.
The scale of Charles’s extramarital relationships was astonishing. He began an intimate relationship with his German secretary, Valeska von Arnim, who gave birth to his son in 1958. Around the same time, he became involved with two of her friends, sisters Brigitte and Marietta Hesshaimer. He ultimately fathered seven children outside his marriage with the three German women.
Charles made regular trips to visit his lovers and children, applying the same discipline he had developed as an aviator to concealing this parallel life. Hansen believes Anne suspected that something was wrong. “Anne knew something was up, but she didn’t know what it was, and she really didn’t want to know what it was,” he told The Post.
When Lindbergh became terminally ill with cancer in 1974, he wanted to die at his favorite retreat: the rustic A-frame home he and Anne owned on Maui’s remote southeastern coast. Doctors warned that he might not survive the journey from his Manhattan hospital bed to Hawaii, but Anne supported his decision. “Going along with how he was and how he wanted everything done, was so typically Anne,” Hansen writes.
Charles asked for his grave to be prepared in the church cemetery at Kipahulu, with space beside it for Anne. She ultimately chose not to be buried there. When she died in 2001, her body was cremated, as she had requested, and her ashes were scattered across several places she had loved. Maui was among them.
