Book Review: The Lindbergh Nanny

The Lindbergh Nanny by Mariah Fredericks (Minotaur Books, 2022).

Pity the writer who tries to do something new with the Lindbergh kidnapping case. The stark facts are ingrained in our culture: the nighttime snatching of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., from his crib in 1932; the frantic search involving the highest levels of law enforcement; the tragic discovery of the child’s body; the conviction and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Those facts have been studied and researched and explored exhaustively; Agatha Christie even famously borrowed them to create the premise for Murder on the Orient Express. There’s not even a lot of room for new speculation, since every aspect of the case has already been speculated about hundreds of times in the decades since the crime was committed.

But Mariah Fredericks, in her new novel, has managed to hit upon a genuinely fresh way of telling the sad old story: by putting it in the mouth of a staffer. The Lindbergh Nanny gives us the point of view of Betty Gow, the young Scottish immigrant who cared for baby Charlie during the last year of his life.

Betty, in Fredericks’s telling, dreams of rising above her working-class roots and becoming someone special. Life in the Lindbergh household teaches her to be careful what she wishes for. Charles Lindbergh was one of the most famous men in the world in the 1930s, and to be part of his circle was to be dogged by the press and by crowds with no sense of boundaries—to experience up close the sickening madness caused by celebrity. At the same time, it could be strangely, jarringly isolating, as Betty was left almost completely alone with young Charlie for months while his parents conducted an experimental flight to Japan.

Much has been written by and about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the baby’s mother and, it must be said, a more appealing figure than her authoritarian husband. (I should note that, in my twenties or thereabouts, I read quite a lot of Anne’s writings, so I already found her appealing before this.)* But reading the story as told by Betty opens up a whole other world, the world of the Lindbergh servants and their counterparts at Anne’s mother’s house.

In Fredericks’s account, most of these servants have their own sad and sordid secrets, which color their views and help shape their fates after little Charlie is taken and the police start asking questions. Fredericks takes pretty big liberties with some of the characters, but she does explain in an appendix what changes she made and why, something I always appreciate when historical novelists do it.

Betty Gow has made her own share of foolish and reckless decisions, but she adores her little charge and finds ways to shield him from his father’s arbitrary and often harsh rules. (The Lindberghs subscribed to a theory of childrearing that sounds like it was invented by Voldemort.) And after that awful night when Betty goes to check on the baby, only to find an empty crib and an open window, her life is altered just as deeply and permanently as his parents’ lives. Just to go on living after the catastrophe—not to mention having to testify at the trial of the accused man—will require strength she didn’t know she had.

Through Betty, Fredericks puts forward her own theory of who gave the kidnappers valuable inside information about the Lindbergh household, and how, and why. It’s just one part of the unique perspective that her sharp-eyed young narrator brings to the Lindbergh tragedy, which makes this story so compelling and different.

*For those interested, Melanie Benjamin has written an excellent novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Aviator’s Wife (Bantam, 2013).

(Cover image copyright Minotaur Books.)

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I wrote for Christ and Pop Culture about abuse and consent in Gabrielle Zevin’s bestselling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, with a little help from Christine Emba’s insightful book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.