by Paul Wolfe
APRIL 2
Insurrection at the Alsops’! After dinner, I made the radical suggestion that the women join the men in the living room for once rather than heading upstairs to the Nunnery of Gossip. “I’m sick, sick, sick of girl talk,” I said to Joe Alsop.
He smiled. “I’m shocked at your contempt for tradition. Men and women together discussing politics violates the fundamental laws of nature, or at least the statutes of Georgetown. But perhaps this once. You rabble-rouser!”
My sister Tony and I joined Ben Bradlee on the couch, while James and Cicely Angleton took seats in club chairs on either side. Cicely said she wanted me to meet her new guru, a man who wears a turban and preaches vegetarianism and abstinence from all intoxicants. I told her that I would wear her clothes, but I would not don her philosophy. I said that for me, steak, liquor, and casual sex were spiritual sacraments. She laughed, and Ben said maybe the women should have adjourned to our customary place upstairs after all. Then he turned to James and suggested that the buildup of US advisors in Vietnam was a quagmire, that we would come to regret ever setting foot in those jungles the French had exited so ingloriously. James Angleton nodded inscrutably, not so much expressing a specific position as allowing any position you wished to be read into his expression.
“Why do we call them advisors?” I burst out suddenly, not considering it a particularly controversial question. “They’re not consultants or coaches. They’re soldiers, for heaven’s sake! Have you noticed this new love for imprecise language and euphemism?”
Tony raised her hand, an admonition for me to end the conversation. I just love being cut off when I speak, especially by a sister.
Ben turned back to Angleton. “It’s guerilla warfare, Jimmy,” he said. “How can you expect regular troops to beat guerillas in a jungle?”
Joe Alsop carried over a fine bottle of Bordeaux and refilled my glass, sighing that he feared Jack was growing soft regarding the conflict in Southeast Asia. I joked within the comfort of my own brain that I was responsible for Jack’s both getting soft and getting hard, but I said nothing, my relationship with Jack a state secret, withheld even from my own sister, who also harbors a crush on the president. So I am as much a liar as everyone else in this crowd, I have come to admit, and if not an official covert agent—and who exactly are those three unidentified men standing over there and chatting with Kirkland Jennings, looking over every now and then in my direction?—certainly I would say I was a “covert coquette on cobblestones” if Cicely and I were still playing Literation, the game we made up at Josselyn Hall. Having taken a vow of silence regarding my relationship with the president, and exhausted by the continual drone about Vietnam, I asked Joe Alsop if he was still making his duck à l’orange.
“Ah yes,” he said. “The secret is in the beurre meunière.”
I asked if he’d seen the new movie of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, which was playing at the Trans-Lux.
“That fairy!” he replied.
APRIL 8
One loses track of the conversation one conducts with life, the conversation one conducts with life, of course, being life itself.
Somewhere between the sad denouement of the UN Charter Conference of 1945, where Cord and I honeymooned, and the advent of three happy sons in a farmhouse in Virginia, I served for a time as one of the fiction editors at the Atlantic Monthly. Fiction editor is a funny title, I thought at the time. A curator of the make-believe.
One day, the editor in chief took me aside and said that I wrote too well. That’s what he said. I wrote too well. “Is that actually a problem?” I asked.
He held up a story I had written about a young couple who leave Manhattan on impulse one day to go run a vineyard in Bordeaux. Here is how the story begins:
It is a place born 69 million years ago when the Pyrenees burst upward from the ocean.
It is a place where gray Atlantic waters meet the brown dust and ash-gray gravel.
It is a place where a Chateau St. Georges meets a medieval castle of Issan . . . where the cottages of Pomerol meet the villages of Sauternes, and vinerows stretch through forests and flatlands and slopes all the way to the imagination.
“You Vassar girls are so florid,” he said, rubbing the page as if to efface its poetry, to deflower its floweriness. “Keats and Shelley are gone, sweetheart. America is a work of prose. It’s a postwar America, and we need a postwar prose to match it. Unembellished. A just-the-facts sort of writing.”
That is what the editor in chief of the Atlantic told me. I didn’t listen to him then, nor do I listen to him now. Words must equal the mystery I try to encompass, the sentences and phrases must capture the power of the life behind them, or why bother writing at all?
Composing this journal is the only writing I do these days. A diary meant to be read, perhaps, by nobody at all. Which is why I paint, for the benefit of walls and perhaps the admiration of an artist I have just met, Kenneth Noland. So far, no one has told me I am too stylish or too florid on my canvases. But of course, I don’t paint in prose.
APRIL 14
I am aware that something leaves my pores and affects men. Something exudes and seizes attention. But I am not Roxanne Childs. To walk beside Roxanne on a sunlit Fifth Avenue last week was to take part in a chemical experiment. The jaws of men lowered in awkward salute to her beauty. She has a new sort of look: her hair hangs down long and straight on both sides as if she has just emerged from the shower, and her lips seem swollen, yet men find it all irresistible, like that pouty French actress. Roxanne walks through it all tall and unconcerned like the model she once was, and our only respite from men’s gaze was a detour into Bonwit Teller. Someday scientists will identify this juice, this chemical, this sizzle of electricity, and life will be far less poetic.
So I am not Roxanne Childs. But I have an appeal. Jack said he is growing fond of me. He always underspeaks, and he remains a playboy with a bad back, a lothario with a limp lumbar. Corseted and medicated. The corset is the reason he stands so straight, of course, the nation’s leader with perfect posture and a lordly mien, but it’s really the corset.
As such, Jack likes it supine, and I give it to him supine. I suppose other girls give it to him supine too—girls are understanding of a man’s back pain. In the supine, they afford smiling Jack an endless display of bouncing breasts: the little ones of skinny girls who played field hockey in the Ivy League, the fleshier ones of the more rounded women of my tradition. But those girls don’t concern me. Those girls are not mysteries, even my sister Tony, not mysterious at all, so Jack and I have a pact that remains unbreakable. Because we’re each of us mysteries to ourselves, as well.
APRIL 22
I survived the Bacchanal on the Rock and lived to tell the tale. On Saturday, Phil and Katharine Graham held their annual “Spring into Spring” soirée in the mansion on Dumbarton Rock. The house oozed sweat and alcohol, and within the bedlam you could feel a palpable hunger for information, as in the crush of men in bars you can feel the palpable hunger for the juices of a woman. A sweating Englishman with a perfect pocket square asked me if I was alone or with someone, and I told him I was with the president of the United States. Jack roared when I told him the story last night, but he was more intent on hearing who got laid and who Phil Graham had pounced upon. I told him it was too crowded to see much, but I did walk into an upstairs bathroom at one point and see two men with their dicks out of their pants and a woman on her knees between them, going from one to the other. I apologized politely and went to find a more private place to pee. Jack exploded, asking who the woman could have been. I said she was facing away from me, but I’m sure it wasn’t Katharine Graham. It dawned on me that I was the only person at the party who wasn’t either a spy, a journalist, a journalist pretending to be a spy, or a spy pretending to be a journalist.
APRIL 25
I ran into Lorraine Cooper as I headed down Thirty-Fourth Street toward the towpath. She says that she is becoming a true part
ner in her husband’s senatorial work, and that even though John is from Kentucky, she’s pushing him into a more emphatic position on civil rights. “He’s more committed to civil rights legislation now than President Kennedy,” she said. I agreed that the black struggle needs far more of the president’s attention. Then she said that while civil rights are being enacted, her house needs redecorating, and she has hired Morgan St. Pierre to re-do the living room, dining room, and kitchen. “You leave it up to John Sherman Cooper and the place will look like Pompeii after a while, with all the paint peeling into ruins. ‘Delphinium, John,’ I told him. ‘Delphinium. Every home should have at least one room that is delphinium blue.’”
APRIL 30
Jackie spun a Milky Way in the White House last night, and I found no flaw in her celestial design. It was a celebration of the power of the human mind, an explosion of jewels and candles and fame’s magnetic field as forty-nine Nobel Prize winners were feted and honored by royalty. Royalty both genetic and artistic.
Jackie whispered a vivacious hello to me, kissing the air on either side of my face and sending molecules of Chanel No. Five cascading into my nostrils. She was luminous in a pink silk shantung gown Christian Dior had designed for the event, while I wore a flimsy little silk beige dress that had seemed charming back in my closet, belonging as it did to my great-grandmother, but here in the White House was clearly a horrific fashion faux pas. The young wife of the shah of Iran, Empress Farah, was assigned the seat beside me, and her diamond tiara could have put electricity to shame. Her necklace of Persian emeralds would ravage the economy of many small nations. Mortified by my modest little beige dress, I left the table and circulated in the crowd.
Robert Frost wandered by, ancient and flinty, his catalog of immortal poems releasing him from any need for pose or politeness. I told him I had once recited “Birches” in high school, suspecting it a thoroughly absurd thing to say as it left my mouth but perhaps not as bad as gushing that I was a big fan of his poems. He struggled to hear me and then sighed, “I am so old!”
Tennessee Williams stood puffing on a long cigarette holder and conversing with Charles Lindbergh, a flier whom Jack always idolized. My father, Amos, once worked with Lindbergh in the America First Committee, they were so dogged trying to keep America out of war with the Germans. Daddy’s isolationism, of course, was driven by a visceral hatred of war; Lindbergh’s, I believe, by a hatred of Jews. I could only imagine what Lindbergh and Tennessee Williams had to talk about.
David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador and Jack’s close friend, danced a fox-trot with his exquisite wife, Sissy, who was bedecked in a gown of pink-and-gold brocade, a gift from King Saud of Saudi Arabia. Ormsby-Gore had been instrumental in pushing for a halt to nuclear proliferation, and I watched him twirl his wife across the floor, thinking about Jack and me, thinking of what might have been in my own marriage had it been a different marriage. When the music stopped, I went up close and thanked David for his contributions to peace. He was smiling radiantly; I wasn’t sure he understood who I was, but I was certain it didn’t matter.
Ernest Hemingway’s widow arrived to represent her husband and his legendary masculine, stripped-down prose style, which never really interested me. She went on to lecture the president on the subject of Cuba for quite a few minutes, and I heard Jack lament to Dave Powers that he had not met such a bore in quite a while. Pamela Harriman passed by in a silk gown of teal and taupe. I said I wanted to get to know her, but she looked at me, looked down at me, as if in profound disappointment with the human race. “In due course, my dear,” she said and turned abruptly to Pierre Salinger, who kissed her hand, leaving me alone with my flimsy little dress and even flimsier hopes for a psychedelic future. You have had sex on seven continents, I felt like saying to her. I’m sure you’ve perfected it by now. But I didn’t. I will continue, however; I have no choice but to continue. In our commitment to the world’s betterment, my family goes on. Though sometimes we don’t. Memories of family tragedy, flashes of suicides, a dying sister, a father in ruins, suddenly flooded into the glittering space as memories do, obeying their own neurological itinerary.
I breathed hard and tried to crush those thoughts, tried to levitate myself back into present time, into this dazzling moment at the White House, illuminated with Nobel Prize winners. Each of them, no doubt, had been similarly discouraged somewhere in their quest. Each was being honored because they had persevered, had chosen the discomfort of what isn’t, instead of the comfort of what is. I am aware that a blonde with Marlboros in her handbag and a president in her bed is no candidate for a Nobel Prize. But I do have a destiny, no less defined, created by innumerable factors that scientists may figure out in ten thousand years. The circumstances of my birth, an eccentric family lineage, the man I happened to marry, the man I happened to fall in love with, a chemical I happened to swallow, and the cobblestone community I live and drink and paint in. Mine is no less a destiny.
I went back to the table and sat beside Empress Farah, who handed me a glass of champagne. We toasted each other, we toasted the future, we toasted being beautiful women. She was a magnificent specimen, so dark and so young, and when I looked back to the Nobel winners, they seemed awkward in comparison. Genius had diverted the energy that non–Nobel Prize winners normally direct toward perfecting the art of chitchat and promulgating an appearance of unalloyed joy at parties. Seated all together in one section of the ballroom, the winners looked confused as to why they were there, unsure of where exactly to focus their minds. Perhaps they would have been more comfortable back in their laboratories or at their writing desks. But Jack rose at his table and addressed them with a toast: “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
MAY 4
I told Jack I was shaken by General Curtis LeMay. The general was holding court at the Alsops’ Saturday in his khaki costume of killing, the threads of his uniform practically straining under the weight of so many foolish ribbons. He sat spread-legged on the couch, airing out his crotch—or, as I suggested, making Jack laugh, perhaps his balls are so gargantuan, sitting spread-legged is his only option. Jack loves when I am vulgar; he adores gossip, especially when it pertains to people he loathes, and he cannot stand to be in the same room as Curtis LeMay. LeMay once shouted in the Oval Office that the proper solution to Cuba was “to fry it.” Ted Sorensen refers to him as his least favorite human being on earth.
So LeMay sat occupying the space of two people on the Alsop couch with the grande dame Susan Mary Alsop beside him, her back as straight as the Washington Monument, as if the two of them were sharing a booth at El Morocco or some such posh nightspot. One doesn’t nab a four-star general every soirée, even in Georgetown, so Curtis LeMay was a four-star coup for Susan Mary. She listened intently, dazzled by the protocols of annihilation. I heard LeMay proclaim that war with Russia is inevitable, that nuclear confrontation is unavoidable; it’s simply a matter of scheduling, so why not get it done now, while we still have a missile advantage? Then Joe Alsop walked past. “Hear, hear,” he said, and kept going. LeMay was puffing away on a cigar that smelled like a decomposing carcass, but no one in Georgetown dared tell him to put it out, and Jack kept smiling, he himself puffing on a cigar. So there was Susan Mary holding up her martini glass in this peculiar way, her hand twisted oddly around the stem, and she was beaming as if it was just the two of them, she and Doctor Death, and I was getting nauseous.
Jack says LeMay is a cocksucker who once told him we’d be better off with Nikita Khrushchev as secretary of defense than McNamara. I say it isn’t the end of the story. LeMay began listing all the cities that will vanish in the conflict, and he sounded as if he were reciting a travel itinerary. A nuclear confrontation would incinerate Washington, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles . . . he went on and on. Most of the major cities in Russia would also be decimate
d, it was all a fait accompli. Nuclear war was already on the way.
Jack says he appointed LeMay head of the US Air Force just to keep him contained. “I’d rather have him pissing out than pissing in.”
What quirk of destiny places me, daughter of peace zealots, in living rooms hobnobbing with men who would destroy the world?
“It’s you and me against the generals,” I tell Jack, my story complete, and he rubs my thigh.
“I’m serious,” I tell him.
“So am I,” he says.
MAY 8
Robin Nightingale says Phil Graham is after her. She was sipping a strawberry shake at Packer’s, and I told her how much I love her ceramics. They look like ancient artifacts dredged from a cave in Zanzibar or extracted from mud at the bottom of the ocean. Strange, bulbous shapes and crusts of dark clay that bespeak an origin impossibly remote. Roxanne Arcturis would suggest the markings of Atlantis, but Robin Nightingale is most assuredly a blonde from our time and place. Who knows where art comes from?
Phil Graham has been after her since he saw her in a bathing suit standing by the Harrimans’ pool. “One piece!” she said. “And you know what this means. When Phil’s on fire there’s no respite, no decelerator pedal, no comprehension of the word no. He corners me in the Wisner kitchen Sunday, and I say to him: ‘I thought you were married.’ ‘Only in a metaphysical sense.’ ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ ‘It means I’m available romantically.’ ‘But I’m not!’ I answer. I’ll probably get a call tonight. If only you could see the number that’s calling you before you pick up a phone.”
I told Robin I had seen bruises on Katharine’s arms and legs. It worries me, but she won’t own up to it. “She’s protecting him. She worships him. Masochism, right?”
“He’s totally Agency, the creep. Operation Mockingbird, they call it.”
I told her I was well aware of my ex-husband’s pet project.
