THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

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.”

      7.

      An Ominous Beginning

      ANNE already knew she was pregnant when the couple looked at cliffside property on the edge of the Palisades not far from her parents’ estate. Anne was concerned that, if they built a home overlooking the Hudson, in an unguarded moment their new baby might tumble into the river below. Her husband told her that “being a Lindbergh it will have more sense than that!”

      Though Anne’s first pregnancy soon became a national fixation, it had little effect on the couple’s exploits in the air. She only grounded herself long enough to get over morning sickness. Charles could barely wait for her to accompany him to pick up a new plane on the West Coast in January 1930 and take it out for test spins. He expected her to help him set a new record flying across the country and then take another flight to Panama and Mexico.

      While the Lindberghs were promoting air travel in California that January, a transport plane crashed on its way to Los Angeles, making national news. It killed all 16 on board. In a letter to her mother-in-law Anne confided that she sometimes feared they would be next. The aviator son of Lindbergh’s sponsor Albert Lambert had died in a crash in 1929 while teaching others to fly. Such stories happened with disturbing frequency. But Anne trusted that Charles had excellent judgment regarding weather conditions suitable for flight.

      For Anne one of the highlights of that trip was getting to know aviatrix Amelia Earhart better. To Anne’s delight and her husband’s consternation, the two women bonded when socializing at the home of a California airline executive. Anne noticed that her husband often displayed jealousy of anyone other than him commanding her undivided attention at a dinner or other gathering.

      The Lindberghs’ next stop was San Diego to visit his friend Hawley Bowlus, the manager of Ryan Aircraft, which had built “The Spirit of St. Louis.” Bowlus had just designed his own large glider. Lindbergh pressured Anne into trying a solo flight to help counter the public’s fear of flying. Anne feared being a sacrificial lamb, but acquiesced despite the fact she was then in her second trimester. Before the cameras, Anne forced herself to smile as a half dozen men worked the ropes to launch her off the side of the tallest hill in the area — a feat no one had tried before. Once aloft, Anne simply sat immobilized while the wind carried the glider down to an awkward stop. Yet, by staying aloft six minutes, Anne became the first woman to obtain a gliding license. Her husband was quite pleased. It would be decades before Anne would admit how petrified she had been.

      On their return home in April 1930, Lindbergh raised eyebrows again by taking Anne — now more than seven-months pregnant — on a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New York in an attempt to set a new record. Anne tried to set her mother’s mind at ease. She was “crazy to get home . . and have nothing ahead except June” when the baby was due. Anne was either being as reckless about her first pregnancy as her husband was or she could not figure out how to say no. In retrospect, she realized she was “tempting providence.” Adverse weather conditions compounded what was already an extremely difficult undertaking in a plane with an open cockpit.

      Lindbergh soared to 10,000 feet to show that getting above the weather was the best alternative for other pilots. But he had not packed along any oxygen. For the last third of the flight Anne was in agony, with a severe headache and nausea from the fumes, compounded by the lack of enough oxygen. She bore her misery in silence, so as not to spoil his chances at a record or prove she was just “a weak woman.”

      When they landed, Anne was fighting back tears and too ill to deplane without help. Yet the airfield