| ROGER ROSENBLATT: Even
the places where they died were opposites. Anne Morrow Lindbergh died
at the age of 94 at her home in wintry Passumpsic, Vermont. On the same
day, Dale Evans died at age 88 at her home in Apple Valley, California.
Until she met and married Roy Rogers, Evans knocked around as a $12-a-week
stenographer and bit player in westerns. When Anne Morrow met Charles
A. Lindbergh, she was on vacation from Smith College, visiting her parents
in Mexico City. Her father, a multimillionaire partner in J.P. Morgan,
was ambassador to Mexico. Her mother, an author, once served as Smith's
acting president. The differences between the two women were more pronounced
than that, but their similar circumstances shaped the feminists they both
became-- feminists in a pre-feminist age. Both experienced tragedies with
their children. Lindbergh suffered through the world-shaking kidnapping
and murder of her 20-month-old son, Charles, Jr. Evans' daughter, Robin,
died of Downs Syndrome shortly before her second birthday. Two of the
Rogers' adopted children died also. A 12-year-old girl was the victim
of a church bus collision; and an 18-year-old, a private in the Army,
choked to death in a military hospital in Germany. Both women were creative
and successful. Lindbergh wrote over two dozen books of poetry and prose,
including the best-selling "Gift From the Sea," which over 20
years sold five million copies.
DALE AND ROY SINGING: Happy trails to you until we meet again...
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Evens composed over two dozen songs, among them,
"Aha, San Antone," which sold over 200,000 copies; "The
Bible Tells Me So"; and "Happy Trails," the theme song
of the "Roy Rogers show" on which she starred with her husband,
often playing third fiddle to the horse Trigger. And both tended toward
conservative politics, though of different stripes. In the 1960s, Evans
joined an actors group who urged a constitutional amendment permitting
school prayer. And Lindbergh was publicly supportive of her husband's
pro- Hitler and isolationist views in the pre-war years. She later admitted
that she had been naive and misled, but the taint of anti-Semitism remained
with them their whole lives. But the deeper connection of these women
is that both owed their fame to their marriages, and yet each possessed
attitudes and gifts that justified their individual prominence. One
was married to the most famous man in the world; the other to the king
of the cowboys. In a sense, both were sidekicks, and the world initially
saw them that way. Yet each was not only separately talented, but also
driven by the desire to show that women-- even those bound to other
glittery lives-- had complex lives of their own, and nerve and spirit.
"I hate namby-pamby heroines," said Evans in praise of a part
she was playing that was "a pleasant departure from the usual western
role, in which the girl stands around while the men do violent and admirable
things." "What a circus act we perform every day of our lives,"
wrote Lindbergh. "Look at us, we run a tightrope daily, balancing
a pile of books on the head-- baby carriage, parasol, kitchen chair--
this is not the life of simplicity, but the life of multiplicity that
the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification, but to fragmentation.
It does not bring grace, it destroys the soul." Lindbergh's observation
remains alive to generations long past hers. Evans, less literary, was
characterized by similar strains of thought. The two women never met--
East and West never met-- but they probably would have got along. Both
had what one used to call "moxie." Both were superior to the
shadows they walked in. And both were joined by a feeling of insistence
that women, including those married to kings, were worth just as much.
I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
|
