Anne Morrow Lindbergh - Later Life

Later Life

After the war, Anne and Charles wrote books that rebuilt the reputations they had gained and lost before World War II. The publication of Gift from the Sea in 1955 earned Anne's place as "one of the leading advocates of the nascent environmental movement" and became a national best seller.

Over the course of their 45-year marriage, Charles and Anne lived in New Jersey, New York, England, France, Maine, Michigan, Connecticut, Switzerland, and Hawaii. Charles died on Maui in 1974. Though (typically) he never showed it, Charles was hurt by Anne's three-year affair in the early 1950s with her personal doctor.

According to Rudolf Schröck, author of Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (Heyne Verlag, 2005), from 1957 until his death in 1974, Charles had an affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a Bavarian woman 24 years his junior, that produced three children, whom he supported financially. In 2003, a spokesman for the Hesshaimer family indicated that DNA tests conducted by the University of Munich proved that Lindbergh fathered the three children. According to Schröck, Charles also had sexual relationships with Brigitte's sister Marietta, who bore him two sons, and with his former private secretary, who bore him two more children.

After suffering a series of strokes in the early 1990s, which left her confused and disabled, Anne continued to live in her home in Connecticut with the assistance of round-the-clock caregivers. During a visit to her daughter Reeve's family in 1999, she came down with pneumonia, after which she went to live near Reeve in a small home built on Reeve's Vermont farm, where Anne died in 2001 at the age of 94 from another stroke. Reeve Lindbergh's book, No More Words, tells the story of her mother's last years.