Monday, June 14, 1999
hat romances defined love in the 20th century? Many come to mind. There was Mrs. Strauss aboard H.M.S. Titanic, refusing to be rescued and declaring, "We have been living together for many years. Where you go, I go." Then there was actress Marion Davies. When her lover, publisher William Randolph Hearst, fell on hard times, she sold off her real estate, stocks and jewelry to keep his creditors at bay. There was the scandal of Charlie Chaplin, who married the very young Oona O'Neill and actually got to live happily ever after with her. And of course Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, battling and drinking in their epic '50s melodrama. Ernest Hemingway said all great love affairs end in tragedy: either disillusion sets in and people "settle" or separate, or one member of the affair dies, leaving the other alone. By that reckoning, all romances are equal, the more famous ones no better, no worse, no more desperate or idealistic than thousands of others. But five relationships kept us spellbound in the 20th century. Extraordinary because of the attention we lavished on them, they are our emblems of that most irrational of emotions and our insights into what we expected of our own hearts.

	Muhammad Ali The American G.I. Diana, Princess of Wales Anne Frank Billy Graham Che Guevara E. Hillary & T. Norgay Helen Keller The Kennedys Bruce Lee Charles Lindbergh Harvey MIlk Marilyn Monroe Mother Teresa Emmeline Pankhurst Rosa Parks Pelé Jackie Robinson Andrei Sakharov Bill Wilson Categories Leaders/Revol. Artists/Entertainers Builders/Titans Scientists/Thinkers

ANNE MORROW AND CHARLES LINDBERGH
He was America's first hero of the century. She was the shy, self-conscious daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Together they were one of America's first celebrity couples in a media-crazy century. With his encouragement, she wrote memoirs of their life that made her one of the country's most popular and famous diarists. Early in the relationship, as Anne wrote ecstatically in 1928, when the couple were "together, alone — all gold, that extra golden bloom over everything!" But, as Lindbergh's biographer A. Scott Berg writes, "their 'storybook romance,' as the press always presented it, was, in fact, a complex case history of control and repression, filled with joy and passion and grief and rage."

Lindbergh wanted his wife to be an independent, modern woman — and yet he wanted to remain the focus and center of her life. She stuck with him through heartbreak and controversy, including the murder of their son and Charles' infatuation with Hitler's Germany. But she was capable of quiet rebellion. She made Charles jealous by becoming smitten with French aviator and writer Antoine de St.-Exupery in 1939. In the '50s, as the marriage stagnated, she allowed a friendship with her doctor to blossom into a short-lived affair. But though Anne believed she and Charles were "badly mated," she deliberately chose to play the role of the hero's wife. As her daughter Reeve told Berg, "Mother enjoyed wearing her hair shirt." Reeve wrote in her own memoir, "It was sometimes an uneasy and uncomfortable union, but my belief, nonetheless, is that neither one of my parents felt fully alive, or truly like himself or herself, unless the other one was there."

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