THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

      Over 20 million airmail stamps were issued with the image of the Spirit of St. Louis.

      4.

      The Search for the Perfect Mate

      AFTER his historic flight, Lindbergh was viewed as the most eligible bachelor in the country, if not the world. Deluged by fan mail and hounded by autograph seekers, the Midwestern pilot was fawned over by women and teen-aged girls everywhere he went. The unwelcome attention started with a young Parisian woman who rushed up to plant a red-lipstick kiss on his cheek shortly after he landed at Le Bourget.

      Star-struck girls who idolized “Lindy” had no idea that at age 25 he had never dated. Indeed, not long before, when he lived in obscurity with fellow pilot Philip “Red” Love in St. Louis, every time Love got on the telephone with a young woman he was interested in, Lindbergh “sang, shouted, whistled, stamped his feet — he banged things, dropped things, rattled things, screeched things” to force his frustrated roommate to end the call.

      Facing hordes of reporters and fans on his return from Paris in May 1927, the reclusive pilot was woefully unprepared for the spotlight. He still had the uncouth habits of spitting on the ground in public and wiping his nose on his sleeve. He was tongue-tied when it came to small talk. He did not have his late Congressman father’s affinity for glad-handing, nor had he ever absorbed his mother’s social skills.

      Philanthropist Harry Guggenheim immediately took the awkward new celebrity under his wing. The Swiss Jew headed the Foundation for Aeronautical Research. Guggenheim sequestered Lindbergh at his Long Island estate and helped Lindbergh acquire a suitable wardrobe and improve his social skills. Of greatest consequence, Guggenheim paired Lindbergh with his own attorney, Henry Breckinridge, for legal and business advice. The two became an inseparable team driven by unbridled ambition.

      Breckinridge had his own far-reaching connections to powerful men. He was then 41 and in the prime of his career. The six-foot-one Ivy Leaguer, from a long line of bluebloods on both sides, was just a generation removed from the schism in his Kentucky family over the Civil War. Two of his father’s brothers fought for the Confederacy, while his father became a Union officer, and later rose to the rank of Major General before retiring.

      With his family connections, a Princeton college degree and a law degree from Harvard Law School, Breckinridge’s career took off quickly. In 1912, he supported New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson (former President of Princeton) as the Democratic candidate for President. After Wilson won, he tapped Breckinridge to serve as Assistant Secretary of War — at the age of 27. Lindbergh was likely far more impressed that Breckinridge won a bronze medal in fencing in the 1920 Summer Olympics and was now training for the 1928 Olympics as the head of the U.S. fencing team. Breckinridge was also an amateur pilot. Lindbergh soon trusted Breckinridge implicitly with all his affairs.

      So many accolades and opportunities had begun cascading upon the Minnesota barnstormer his head was spinning. After Congress voted Lindbergh the first medal of honor awarded a civilian, requests for endorsements poured in, totaling $5 million in what seemed like a blink of an eye. Lindbergh was immediately offered a starring role in a Hearst-produced movie opposite the newspaper mogul’s mistress, Marion Davies. He accepted the offer but managed to wiggle out of it after Breckinridge convinced him he would regret it.

      Chief among the proposals Breckinridge suggested Lindbergh should accept was Guggenheim’s plan to bankroll a four-month promotional tour for commercial aviation. Lindbergh earned $50,000 visiting every one of the then forty-eight states, landing in over eighty cities that each honored him with a parade. By one later estimate, nearly a fourth of all Americans turned out to see him. Throughout this tour Lindbergh was accompanied by a bodyguard, John Fogarty, a former detective, who had worked with one of Breckinridge’s brothers when he was in the New York District Attorney’s office.

      Though Lindbergh turned down millions of dollars in offers, and donated gifts to museums, he accepted shares in new airline companies, which asked him to sit on their boards. Lindbergh soon also profited handsomely from his autobiography. Less than a year since he had scraped by, counting every penny, Lindbergh would become a millionaire, never in danger of going broke again. He made sure his mother was financially secure, too.

      That summer and fall, Guggenheim introduced him to wealthy patrons who immediately embraced the national hero as one of their own. Lindbergh was of white Protestant stock at a time when control of America remained firmly in the hands of those with a similar religious and racial makeup. Of pure Nordic descent on his father’s side, the tall blond pilot, was the very image the elite wanted to project of traditional wholesomeness, bravery, and self-reliance.

      From his arrival in New York after his flight to Paris, in or out of his flight clothes, on or off the field, journalists and cameramen hounded the aviation pioneer. This was only the beginning of an insatiable media appetite for family photos and details of his background for newspaper editors to manipulate to fit the image of the hero the public craved to admire.

      During his tour across America that summer, Lindbergh focused single-mindedly on expanding interest in commercial aviation. He was repulsed time and again by obsessed female fans who made off with souvenir pillow slips he had slept on or underwear they filched from his hotel laundry service. More than once someone absconded with his fedora left with a restaurant hat checker. He took to scowling at the camera and behaving rudely toward mobs of adoring fans. He soon began burning all the myriad letters he received without having anyone open them to sort out those he might wish to read and consider a reply.

      Lindbergh remained surrounded by pretty young women almost everywhere he went. Yet he found it difficult to get beyond the awkward exchange of pleasantries. It got under his skin that the press wrote up any hint of interest he showed in the few females he found worthy of his attention. Some reporters even fabricated dates with women he had never met. For relief, Lindbergh turned to his usual source of amusement. He annoyed his new assistant Harry Bruno with practical jokes: “He’d put a fish in your camera, a blunt blade in your razor or switched the keys in your typewriter.” The public never realized the extent of that nasty habit.

      By late July 1927, New York Times reporter Carlisle MacDonald was nearing completion of the ghostwritten manuscript for Lindbergh’s autobiography that Lindbergh had agreed to do in May. Lindbergh read the draft while secluded at Guggenheim’s Long Island estate. He became incensed at MacDonald’s presumptuous retelling of his life. Lindbergh remained at the estate while he set about rewriting the story in his own words. What disappointed Lindbergh most was that the ghostwritten draft left out all of his pranks. Rewriting the book that fall, the newly acclaimed paragon of “American idealism, character and conduct” took special delight in inserting some of his more memorable pranks, as well as racist anecdotes from his barnstorming days. In retelling some of his favorite stories, Lindbergh was careful to suppress incidents of his most sadistic behavior.

      The “most notorious and cruel” of Lindbergh’s practical jokes involved a younger pilot he recruited to his airmail team — Harlan “Bud” Gurney. One night when the two shared a room at a boarding house, Lindbergh filled the water pitcher with kerosene. Gurney quickly drank two dippersful from the pitcher before he realized he was not downing water. He wound up in the hospital with a severely burnt throat, lucky to be alive. Uncharacteristically, Lindbergh later regretted that he had not devised a more “moderate” practical joke to teach Gurney a lesson for Gurney’s thoughtlessness in not doing his fair share of refilling the pitcher for the two of them. The near disaster did not dissuade Lindbergh from devising cruel tricks against other hapless victims.

      As Lindbergh worked on his autobiography, “WE,” he mostly avoided all women except his mother. Yet the tall blond hero began seriously considering his marriage prospects. Lindbergh approached the issue of marriage and family scientifically. In the summer of 1927 Lindbergh had received a plaque from the Minnesota Eugenics Society “in recognition of his superior hereditary endowment.” He felt he had a special obligation to pass on his acclaimed genes to help perpetuate the most advanced race of people. By then, eugenics had become firmly entrenched as “the religion of aristocrats” who believed “Western civilization