THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

some irony involved. Bennett had been favored, along with Commador Richard Byrd, to win the Orteig Prize in 1927 but got sidelined with a serious injury during a practice flight, leaving the field open to Lindbergh.

      Lindbergh’s courageous rescue mission deeply impressed Anne, though the medicine arrived too late to make a difference. In May, her idol flew from St. Louis to New York, but created the heart-stopping headline “Lindbergh Missing” after he failed to check in on arrival. The aviator was presumed dead, like so many hapless pilots before him, until he turned up and mocked the fake news he had engendered. Anticipating Lindbergh’s next visit at the Morrows’ new summer home, Anne fantasized about him once more, telling her diary it might be “sentimental hero-worship” but he was “the finest man I ever met.” Yet she considered him “someone utterly opposite to me” and clearly outside of her world.

      Lindbergh’s schedule proved too busy to join the Morrow family in Maine. Then Anne learned from her aunt that he still planned to see Elisabeth that fall in New York. She concluded his marriage to Elisabeth was “inevitable.” Anne confided to her diary: “That dream is peacefully dead — speedy burial advised.” She and her sister Connie started speculating about who would come to Elisabeth’s elaborate wedding.

      If Lindbergh had tried to woo Elisabeth Morrow that fall, he likely would have faced a surprising rebuff. Earlier that year Elisabeth had made a pact with her close friend from Smith, Connie Chilton, to love each other and no one else. The two made plans to start a preschool together in Englewood, New Jersey. Her parents feared the young women had begun a lesbian relationship. The Morrows did their best to keep the pair apart. In September 1928, Elisabeth left on a trip to Europe.

      Meanwhile, on Henry Breckinridge’s advice, Lindbergh accepted a job at Pan American Airways and a position as technical advisor and board member at Transcontinental Air Transport, which later became Trans World Airlines. In exasperation at how much the media dogged his every move, Lindbergh told a colleague: “I’m going to quit! I’ll go out of my mind if they don’t stop pushing me.” He completed his farewell tour in the Spirit of St. Louis with a flight from St. Louis to the nation’s capital and returned to Manhattan where he often stayed with Breckinridge between travels.

      Breckinridge was then newly married to his second wife, Aida, who was also an aviation pioneer of sorts. As a teenager in 1903 she took a few flying lessons from inventor and aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont and made a short hop on her own in his dirigible — the first woman in the world to fly solo in a powered aircraft. (It was a brief adventure. Aida accidentally landed it in the middle of a French polo match.)

      The Breckinridges provided a welcome refuge from paparazzi and fans. Lindbergh now intended to move forward with marriage plans. Meanwhile, at Dwight Morrow’s urging, Lindbergh ventured into politics. On October 3, 1928, the pilot endorsed Herbert Hoover for President. That same day, Lindbergh called the Morrows’ home in Englewood and asked for Mr. or Mrs. Morrow or Elisabeth. Lindbergh learned that Elisabeth had gone to Europe, but that Anne was expected home later that night. He called back the next day and offered to make good on a flying lesson. Anne put him off because she was scheduled for minor surgery. The following week when they met up, her excitement diminished when the first thing he asked her was when Elisabeth would return from her trip overseas. Anne was his clear second choice. Lindbergh wanted to avoid the press, so they agreed to a late morning rendezvous at the apartment house in Manhattan of a close colleague of Anne’s father. Anne assumed they would grab sandwiches before heading out to Long Island in his new car to board his plane. She had dressed for the open cockpit flight in her mother’s raincoat, an old wool top of her mother’s, her sister Connie’s riding pants, and her father’s golf socks incongruously stuffed into high-heeled shoes. She carried a leather jacket in case she needed it in the open-air cockpit and apologized to Lindbergh for not wearing boots. Anne was both surprised and painfully embarrassed when Lindbergh brought her first to the Guggenheim mansion for an elaborate luncheon. All the other women showed up in high fashion. Before entering, Anne put on her smarter-looking red leather jacket instead of her raincoat. She proceeded to swelter through the unexpected ordeal.

      The Guggenheim estate had its own landing field where Lindbergh said he would pick her up. Lindbergh then departed for Roosevelt Airfield to fetch his biplane. During his absence, the Guggenheims shocked Anne with stories of the stunts he had pulled on them while staying as their guest. One of his favorites was when they went canoeing. He would tip the canoe over to watch them get drenched and scramble for shore. Between the army and barnstorming, Lindbergh had developed a large repertoire of practical jokes he could not resist playing on anyone he spent significant time with.

      Whatever misgivings Anne had about Lindbergh’s immaturity went by the wayside when he came back with a helmet and pair of goggles for her to don for their aerial tour of the city and parts of New Jersey. He also showed her how to use a parachute in the unlikelihood they had to ditch the plane. Lindbergh then tested her ability to subordinate herself unquestioningly to his will. Once safely airborne, he instructed the petrified neophyte to take the wheel temporarily, assuring her it was safe. Despite her fright, she obliged. Anne pushed herself well beyond her comfort zone to do whatever he commanded.

      Anne was soon writing to her sister Connie about the flying lessons but did not tell Elisabeth or their parents. Elisabeth was still in London, having taken to bed with recurrent pneumonia. Her mother had already heard about Anne being with Lindbergh at the Guggenheims and warned Anne that her father would not appreciate seeing her name turn up in newspaper gossip columns. Despite her excitement, Anne herself had developed major reservations about Lindbergh as a suitor. She considered him “terribly young and crude in many small ways.”

      While her parents remained in Mexico City, Anne and Charles visited the new family mansion, “Next Day Hill,” in Englewood, New Jersey, under the watchful eye of the housekeeper. Lindbergh suggested that he and Anne take a drive through the local countryside. Anne later wrote a fictionalized account of a couple very much like herself and Charles on a similar driving date. The young man was also considered a “great catch,” but terrible at small talk. Once he parked the car, he gave his date a lecture on carbon monoxide poisoning and then suddenly made “an awkward lunge across the front seat and blurt[ed] out a proposal of marriage. Astonished at winning such a prized beau, she accepts.”

      To escape for time alone together during their stay in Mexico with her family in the fall of 1928, Anne and Charles would disguise themselves and slip out a servants’ entrance to avoid reporters. Despite how exhilarating it felt to be engaged to “the Prince of the air,” Anne vacillated over her decision during the next couple of months. She sometimes felt there was a “hideous chasm” between her world and his.

      By the end of the year Anne informed her parents she had agreed to marry Lindbergh. The Morrows were, by then, less than thrilled with the prospect. The Morrows were sophisticated and worldly-wise. Dwight Morrow was highly educated and read voraciously. He enjoyed stimulating conversations about politics and was partial to alcohol. Lindbergh was a college drop-out, poorly informed, but opinionated. He was also a teetotaler with a puerile sense of humor and few manners. When the family went canoeing, he would pull the same trick he had pulled on both the Guggenheims and Breckinridges. Anne found it tiresome.

      Lindbergh’s later claim that his choice of Anne Morrow to marry and bear his children was a product of careful study of her heredity did not match even cursory knowledge of her family’s health history. Certainly, by the fall of 1928 he figured out that Anne was a sturdier choice for having children than Elisabeth. Elisabeth’s slow convalescence from a second serious bout with pneumonia had the family quite worried. Lindbergh likely learned from Anne that Elisabeth had rheumatic fever as a child that left her with a heart murmur. Nor was her father a strong physical specimen. He stood under five-feet-five inches tall, suffered from chronic migraines, bouts of depression and digestive problems, and had one deformed arm.

      As a teetotaler, Lindbergh also must have noticed Dwight Morrow’s chronic drinking problem. Anne’s mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, was smart and industrious, but also prone to ailments. She was a twin, whose sister died as a child of tuberculosis. Elizabeth Morrow had another sister with severe developmental disabilities. Dwight Jr., the only son, had also been frail and sickly as a child. Some