The Not So Lone Eagle

Good grief. It seems that Charles Lindbergh led a double (triple? quadruple?) family life, with three DNA-certified children in Germany with one woman and uncertified others with her sister and with a woman  who was his "private secretary" in Germany.

How does it feel to have written a 628-page biography of a very public man, one that follows the current convention of giving almost equal weight to the man's family life, and then to discover that you have missed half or perhaps three-quarters of his wives?

Even more amazing, how in the world did Lindbergh pull it off? Scott Berg calls him "the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth." Yet year after year this very public man donned a beret, rented a Volkswagen, and drove up to the homes of his common-law wives in Germany and Switzerland. If all the kids attributed to him are truly his, he fathered seven of them in eight years, meanwhile micromanaging the lives of his own five children by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and all the while being tracked by paparazzi. Really, it's a feat that relegates his New York - Paris flight to comparative insignificance. I look forward to reading Reeve Lindbergh's Forward From Here, which tells of meeting her half-siblings. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford