PLAYWRITING LINGBERGH'S FALL FROM GRACE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

He was bigger than O.J., bigger than Gen. MacArthur - maybe even bigger than Nixon.

To the American public, Charles A. Lindbergh was more than a dashing young folk hero. He was the very incarnation of the nation's hopes and aspirations, a mirror image of a people at its idealized best.

Yet within a decade or so, he plummeted from being perhaps the most admired man in America to possibly the most despised. And when the Lone Eagle fell, he took part of the popular imagination down with him.

Of course American history is rife with examples of once-lionized men brought low, says writer Larry Cohen.

But he insists that Lindbergh was a special case.

``Let's face it, Nixon was always hated,'' Cohen says. Lindbergh's story, Cohen asserts, ``was as if JFK had turned out like Nixon.''

Cohen attempts to extract some sense from that paradox with his new play ``Fallen Eagle: The Untold Story of Charles A. Lindbergh,'' which opened last month at The Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts in North Hollywood. It's playing there through Dec. 15.

Several of ``Fallen Eagle'''s themes will be familiar followers of Cohen's career.

A prolific, if cultish, screenwriter, playwright and movie director (``It's Alive,'' ``Original Gangstas''), Cohen, 58, may be best-known for ``The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover,'' his 1977 bio-pic about the former FBI chief. Intended as a dramatic expose of Hoover's crimes and misdemeanors, the movie proved equally popular with devotees of high camp, who revelled in such images as an inebriated Hoover listening to a government officer's secret sex tapes.

Cohen had long been aware of certain parallels between John Edgar and Lucky Lindy.

``I've always been interested in heroes who turn out to be villains or villains who turn out to be heroes,'' he says, sipping cabernet sauvignon at his Beverly Hills home. Ironically, the Spanish-colonial residence once belonged to the scion of yet another former national idol, publishing magnate William Randolph Heart's son Charles.

``Both (Hoover and Lindbergh) were secretive men with dark sides,'' Cohen continues. ``Both men projected a very different side to the public.''

In crafting the 15-character play, which he also directed, Cohen believes he found the ``Rosebud'' behind Lindbergh's swift descent.

Barely 25, the photogenic pilot was propelled onto the front pages after becoming the first to fly solo across the Atlantic. Cheered in Manhattan and hailed on Capitol Hill, Lindbergh became a technical adviser to airlines and married Anne Morrow in 1929.

The sky, it seemed, was his only limit. In today's fickle celebrity culture, it may be hard to appreciate the adulation given to Lindbergh.

``The gangsters were the heroes before Linbergh came along. It was the period of booze and flappers and free sex and people eating goldfish and climbing telephone polls. And suddenly along came this hero and they wrote songs to him and named a dance after him.

Then in 1932 came the infamous kidnapping and murder of the couple's infant son, followed by the traumatically public trial of the accused, Bruno Hauptmann.

Cohen believes that Lindbergh lost his self-respect after perjuring himself in order to gain Hauptmann's conviction. Lindbergh's unraveling accelerated when he opposed U.S. entry into World War II and made radio broadcasts that were widely condemned as anti-Semitic.

Though he later flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific, his stature never fully recovered.

But rather than leaving Lindbergh in this toppled state, ``Fallen Eagle'' takes the story up to the early 1960s, when President Kennedy partially restored Lindbergh's dignity by inviting him to the White House.

``I didn't just do the rise and fall; I tried to do the rise and the fall and the rise again,'' says Cohen.

``I may be completely wrong about everything, but it's Larry Cohen's history.''

THE FACTS

The play: ``Fallen Eagle: The Untold Story of Charles A. Lindbergh.''

The run: Through Dec. 15.

Where: Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts, 5124 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

When: Performances are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday; through Dec. 15.

ickets: $12. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: ``I didn't just do the rise and fall; I tried to do the rise and the fall and the rise again,'' says Larry Cohen of his play ``Fallen Eagle: The Untold Story of Charles A. Lindbergh.''