THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

supplies with his seaplane. Much to Anne’s disappointment, Lindbergh agreed. When corresponding with her family back in the states, Anne mostly minimized the hardships of their prolonged trip. They sometimes slept in the cramped quarters of the plane and went days without bathing. An accident forced the couple to bail out in life preservers into the unsanitary Yangtze River. Anne’s nightmare would be “to die screaming,” but the emergency evacuation felt instead like an out-of-body experience. Lindbergh always encouraged Anne to make detailed notes of their flying adventures. She would chronicle this journey in her book North to the Orient, which became a best-seller when published in 1935.

      When she left Little Charlie with Betty Gow, Anne had originally thought the Morrows would be spending the entire time they were gone with her son. She asked her mother to send pictures each month of the boy as he grew, despite her husband’s reluctance to have their son photographed. The Morrows returned to Englewood in mid-September and left their grandson with Betty in Maine out of concern about exposing him to a polio epidemic in the New York area. Back in New Jersey, the Morrows were also immersed in politics.

      Not surprisingly, Morrow’s Senate campaign centered on ending prohibition. That proved overwhelmingly popular with the voters. Morrow himself still drank to excess and was now under a lot of stress. He died suddenly of a stroke on October 5, 1931, just after delivering a major radio speech. New Jersey’s new Senator was only fifty-eight, a devastating loss to the family keenly felt by the Republican Party as well. Dwight Morrow’s body was placed in an open casket in the library of his mansion so that colleagues, friends and family could pay their respects. An enormous funeral followed with his friend ex-President Coolidge among the distinguished attendees. Afterward, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Harry Moore offered Elizabeth Morrow her husband’s seat for the remainder of his term, but she declined.

      Anne was beside herself that she received the shocking news while on an American aircraft carrier in China. She immediately got her husband to cut short their overseas trip. Since their plane was then being repaired in Shanghai, they disembarked in Japan and returned via ship to Seattle. The slowness of their return must have been agonizing for Anne. They borrowed an airplane in Seattle to fly back to New York, arriving home on October 19 — two weeks after her father died.

      9.

      Getting Reacquainted with “Hi” and “Mum Mum”

      ACHAUFFEUR drove Mrs. Morrow and her daughter Elisabeth up to Maine to bring Betty and Little Charlie back to Englewood. Left alone with Betty for a month, the toddler clung to his nanny, and she doted on him. While in Maine, she had his hair trimmed slightly and purchased a new outfit for him out of her wages. (No one had left her money for out-of-pocket expenses.) She was thrilled when his first word was “Betty.” Anne would not be.

      Following her husband’s sudden death, Mrs. Morrow found great solace in being reunited with her grandson. When Anne and Charles arrived back at Englewood, a noticeable gloom pervaded the formerly happy household. Anne was still in shock and just beginning to grieve for her father, deepening her emotional reaction to seeing her son again. After being left behind by his parents for almost three months, Charlie did not recognize them. He cried when they approached, as he did with any stranger.

      Upon returning from the Far East, Lindbergh was not happy that photographs of his son had been taken during the couple’s absence. He immediately forbade any new pictures of his son, whose blond curls still partially obscured the size of his head. Starting at the end of October 1931, Lindbergh took steps to ensure no new photos of the Little Eaglet would be released to the press by the family.

      From time to time, Anne had confided in letters to her mother-in-law concerns about her husband’s ambivalence toward their son. In the spring of 1931 Anne had described Charles taking the baby and squeezing him around the neck, perhaps playfully, but her choice of wording was ambiguous: “He smiles and holds out his hands … and then strangles him affectionately.”

      As the Lindberghs settled back into their spacious quarters at the Morrow mansion that November, Anne was pleasantly surprised that her husband now took more interest in the boy. He fed him some toast with jam from his own plate, swung him “ceiling flying” and nicknamed him “Buster.” Charlie called his father “Hi.” The little boy enjoyed being swung in the air and asked his father to do it “den!” (“Again!”). Yet others noted that Lindbergh bestowed another, far less endearing nickname on his son — “It.” Someone on the Morrow staff leaked to reporters that the little boy began repeating “It” among his very first new words after his father’s return.

      The Lindberghs could not wait to resettle in their secluded new home. Most of the work getting it ready for occupation had been done while they were on their trip to Asia. While it was under construction, a local man named Lee Hurley had been hired to watch over the property to prevent theft of building materials and supplies. Anne was especially concerned about how they would keep the public out of their property after the house was finished. Her father must have known that Lindbergh was paying a local man to protect the building site. Had he still been alive when the farmhouse was completed, Dwight Morrow would have been outraged to learn that his son-in-law refused Hurley’s request to be kept on as a permanent guard.

      The Lindberghs took a day trip to their new home on October 25, 1931, accompanied by Mrs. Morrow and Elisabeth. Access to the new property was difficult. Many roads were not marked; some were unpaved. For Mrs. Morrow’s chauffeur from Englewood, finding the estate north of the small town of Hopewell was hard to do even during the day. Once you got there, you had to negotiate a long snake of a driveway before reaching the farmhouse.

      The $50,000 French Provincial home was not visible from the public road. Its two-and-a-half stories consisted of two, two-story wings jutting out east and west from the main part of the building. Its large basement was fitted with special wiring so Lindbergh could build a laboratory there. The house was constructed of local fieldstones finished in white cement and, as yet, had no window coverings. The half story at the top remained an unfinished attic.

      The Lindberghs’ new home still had no beds, but that was soon remedied. On Halloween night, Anne, her mother and sister spent one night there with Little Charlie. Instead of having help from a nanny, Anne wanted time to bond with her son herself. But rising at 6:30 a.m. to change him and give him breakfast was not what she had in mind. She asked Elsie Whateley to get Charlie from the nursery and take care of him until Anne completed her own morning routine.

      On the Sunday of their overnight stay, the family enjoyed leisure time with Little Charlie on the terrace. Anne may have already been following Dr. Van Ingen’s advice to get the boy as much sun as possible. Anne planned to fill the downstairs study with her extensive book collection. Her husband’s smaller collection, consisting mostly of scientific books, would be shelved in their bedroom. Originally, Anne had hoped to move into their new home before Thanksgiving, but it still needed painting inside. Anne thought the yard would look better with a bed of tulips by the house and put white ones in before winter hit.

      Lindbergh had been home from their China trip only for a few weeks before he was off again on a two-week trip to the Caribbean for Pan-Am in mid-November. Anne declined to accompany him. She wanted to stay with her widowed mother in Englewood and reestablish a bond with her toddler without a nanny. Lindbergh agreed to give Betty Gow three-months’ leave.

      There was still no way to avoid constant public scrutiny of the Lindberghs’ every move. One of the most widely read gossips of the time was syndicated columnist and radio host Walter Winchell. Two thousand newspapers around the world carried his column each day and twenty million people heard his Sunday night radio program. So, Anne must have felt acutely self-conscious when Winchell publicly announced that she must be pregnant again if she was not flying to Panama with her husband. Actually, Anne would not learn until December that she was pregnant with her second child.

      Anne realized that her husband might feel otherwise, but she did not consider herself to be missing out by staying home while he flew solo to Panama. The last trip had been extraordinarily grueling, with three forced landings. She had always been close to her mother and wanted to be with the family as they grieved the loss of her father. She also delighted