His portrait of one of the most fascinating Americans of this century will surely be definitive. The Lindbergh who emerges is composed and methodical, comfortable in the company of kings – yet also shy, oddly childish and, it would soon transpire, disastrously gullible.Had the Charles Lindbergh of 1935 vanished forever into a monastery, he would have been a saint for all time. He had handled fame with superhuman aplomb, turning down endorsements worth $5m (a staggering sum at the time) and giving away his trophies free to a museum in St Louis. Even through the hysteria of the trial he had managed to preserve his dignity. But then perfection began to crumble, and celebrity brooks no deviation from the image it has created.Death threats and endless, suffocating publicity convinced Lindbergh to seek refuge in Britain. Even there, he could not find “closure” – to use today’s fashionable term – since Hauptmann went to the electric chair maintaining his innocence.
Berg, incidentally, sheds little new light on the that controversy. But like most who have studied the case deeply, he is sure Hauptmann was guilty, either alone or with an accomplice.In Europe, Lindbergh’s judgement departed. Convinced that Britain and France were weak and defeatist, he came to admire Hitler’s Germany, detecting in the Third Reich “a spirit I have not seen in any other country”, and lamenting what he saw as the Jewish grip on the US media. In 1939, he went home to join the isolationist movement America First, warning against “entanglement” in a European war, and suggesting, in August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, that “co-operation with a victorious Germany need not be impossible”.Lindbergh’s reputation was ruined. Though he did fly some missions against Japan late in the Pacific war, and later wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning account of his 1927 flight, America could never look on him in the same way again.
Perhaps despairing of his fellow humans, he threw himself into environmental causes. His marriage to Anne, by now an author in her own right, was by the end little more than in name, and he lived out his closing years in a remote house he had built on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He died in 1974, the first, and perhaps the most intriguing, truly global superstar of our celebrity-besotted century.Rupert Cornwell. I WELCOME The Independent giving an “ordinary” Muslim the opportunity to let the rest of us see her community through her eyes. Yasmin Alibhai- Brown says that it would be unthinkable for people to say about Jews, blacks or gays the kind of slanderous things they say in the media about Muslims. The virtual immunity from criticism which Jews enjoyed in this country and the United States, for example, no longer applies to the actions of the right wing in Israel.
Neither does her statement hold water for gays who, like Muslims, are not protected by law from defamation and also, as a group, are the target of violence. But most gays have learned to live with the stereotyping and to counter it, wherever possible, with personal courage and “coming out”. The more that the general populace see ordinary Muslim people sharing the same kinds of daily joys and frustrations as the rest of us, the more that each “side’s” mutual feelings of persecution will subside.
Freedom of speech is an important element of our society. We should all feel able to criticise those who behave badly, whoever they are, including those who belong to our own group. If we do not criticise those acting excessively in our own group, whatever that may be, there is a real danger that our silence will be taken as condoning this behaviour – to the ultimate disadvantage of the group as a whole. Ms Alibhai-Brown has courageously taken this on, and others in her community need to follow her good example.We should also oppose any laws that seek to give any religious groups special protection from criticism. Sometimes that criticism is justified, and must not be stifled by automatically being branded “anti-Christian”, “Islamophobic”, “anti-Semitic” etc..
ONE OF Britain’s most popular film actresses of the Forties, Rosamund John was voted second only to Margaret Lockwood as the country’s favourite British female star in 1944. Among her films were two of the finest of the decade, The Way to the Stars and Green for Danger. A grey-eyed honey-blonde, she was one of the most interesting of the well-bred heroines who dominated the British screen of that time. “In those days we were much more ladylike than they are now,” she said recently. “We used to admire ladies in French films because in them actresses were allowed to be real: but English films made us unreal because the audience liked being taken out of the reality of the war.”
Intensely political, she retired into a long and happy marriage to the Labour MP John Silkin and could often be seen attending the House of Commons to hear him speak.Born Nora Rosamund Jones in Tottenham, north London, in 1913, she was educated at the Tottenham Drapers’ College, then attended the Embassy School of Acting Her early ambitions were to be an actress or author.
