The public’s insatiable appetite for gossip, cynically fed by newspapers, was to blame, he was sure, for the most terrible event in his life-the 1932 kidnapping and murder of his twenty-month-old son, quickly dubbed the “crime of the century.” Almost as shocking as the act itself was the grisly media spectacle of the trial. Still, Lindbergh could not escape his fame, and it exacted a singular price.

He learned early to avoid the press, which he loathed, remaining incorruptibly private, his own man. The first modern celebrity, he resisted the cheap trappings of success, spurning offers worth over $1 million from Hollywood, vaudeville, and hucksters of every kind. Of the many sobriquets applied to him, “Lone Eagle” was the most apt. In Manhattan, more than four million people lined the streets to see him, and within three weeks, Berg reports, “an estimated 7,430,000 feet of newsreel had recorded his movements.” Lindbergh had become “the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth.” Navy, the entire nation seemed to be waiting at dockside. When he returned home, courtesy of the U.S. The twenty-five-year-old aviator was swept up in a wave of public adoration. Of course, the instant Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris, the sublime solitude ended. Scott Berg writes in his new biography, “he failed to note that no man before him had ever been so much alone in the cosmos.” “While Lindbergh later said that no man before him had commanded such freedom of movement over earth,” A. Louis the day before, there had been no word of the plane and its pilot. Lindbergh’s takeoff from New York City in the Spirit of St. In an era of staged events and planned spectacles, it is almost impossible to imagine what so many millions felt on May 21, 1927, when the news came that a tiny silver aircraft had broken through the morning fog west of Ireland and was pushing on toward Paris.

Lindbergh by a scott berg