Larger Than Life -- Biography Of Charles Lindbergh Is Dauntingly Definitive

------------------------------- "Lindbergh" by A. Scott Berg Putnam, $30 -------------------------------

The first three pages of A. Scott Berg's new biography of Charles Lindbergh are terrific. Set in Paris the evening that Lindbergh landed after his trans-Atlantic flight, they limn the mass excitement, the traffic jams, the street celebrations and the start of the first great media feeding frenzy.

Even now that we see feeding frenzies by the month, if not week, it's a description that raises goosebumps. No wonder Steven Spielberg bought the movie rights to this book. It has a natural first scene, a perfect epic start - but Spielberg is going to have a hard time making the rest of the movie match up.

Though Lindbergh was one of the most public figures of the century, he was an intensely private man, even to those ostensibly closest to him. His personality was cold to the point of freezing. Despite shelves of previous biographies, he has stubbornly remained a cipher, a blank slate on which anyone can project anything they want.

If a single biographer could get beyond this mask, surely it would be Scott Berg. The Los Angeles author's biographies of movie producer Sam Goldwyn and of literary editor Maxwell Perkins, which won the National Book Award, were lively and full of fascinating detail. Moreover, Berg had done what long seemed impossible: He'd persuaded Anne Morrow Lindbergh to give him full access not only to friends and family, but also to the massive archive of both her husband's and her papers and diaries.

The result is the authorized biography - and that's the problem with this book, which is available in bookstores nationwide tomorrow. It certainly is definitive, which may mean a moratorium on any more lives of Lindbergh, at least in the near future. But authorization can sometimes be as much albatross as blessing.

"Lindbergh" is weighed down not only by the massive accumulation of detail, but also by the directorial pen of Lindbergh himself, who wrote notes to any future biographer in the margins of his papers ("Do not believe this man. What this letter says is not true. Please see my diaries or Anne's diaries"). The result is that after more than 600 exhaustive pages, anyone seeking a real sense of the man is haunted by the strange feeling that there's no there there.

Occasionally, some tempting morsel leaps off the page, like King George's eagerly asking after Lindbergh's famous flight, "How did you pee?" (Answer: a paper cup.) And sometimes the details are truly revealing. After his infant son's kidnapping and murder, for instance, even Lindbergh's wife never saw him shed a tear.

He did have passions. Making lists, for example. A lifelong list-maker who inaugurated the use of checklists by all pilots, Lindbergh even made lists for his own funeral, down to the specifications for the coffin and the grave. His list of Things To Do was divided into Current, Immediate and Near Future. What didn't fit into lists, it seems, didn't exist for him.

He rarely came home for Christmas, missed one daughter's wedding and stayed away while his wife was in the hospital for weeks, pleading with him to come. The boy whose mother used to shake his hand good night and whose rigidly disciplinarian father led to him treating his own children (there were five after the murdered infant) with the same touch of sadism, was the man who wrote his youngest daughter just before she married: "If I could choose but one thing I could impress on my children from whatever wisdom I have gained in life, it would be the importance of genetics in mating."

Berg deals methodically with all the controversial questions. On the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the infant's kidnapping and murder: Guilty as charged. On Lindbergh's isolationism up to Pearl Harbor: A reflection of his congressman father's isolationism in World War I. On racism and anti-Semitism: A clear obsession with the purity of "the White race." And on Hitler and the Third Reich: An avid admirer, seduced by his admiration for the technical perfection of the Luftwaffe.

As his own sister-in-law put it, Lindbergh's politics transformed him within 15 years from Jesus into Judas. But Berg never really discusses the dynamics behind the transformation from Public Hero No. 1 into Public Enemy No. 1, which may have more to do with what we expect from our heroes than with the heroes themselves.

Charles Lindbergh was a superbly skilled pilot and a man of immense courage. He spearheaded the development of modern aviation. His trans-Atlantic flight was heroic, yet his personality was adolescent, his politics those of the Aryan Nation.

There are no contradictions here, merely a sad personality led by his passion for machines and flight to take the starring role in one of the great sagas of the century. The fact is that Lindbergh, in effect, flew solo his whole life.

Seattle writer Lesley Hazleton's new book "Driving to Detroit: An Automotive Odyssey," will be published next month by The Free Press.