by Paul Wolfe
“Leave Mary alone. She’s an artiste,” said Bebe Highsmith.
“No, take off her pants,” said Kay Graham. “Let’s finally see what it is these men are all making such a fuss over.”
I told them they were making me blush, though they weren’t making me blush. I was on a mission. I asked Lorraine how our LSD project went with her husband, John Sherman Cooper. “I practically had to shove the fucking pill down his throat,” she said. “He kept saying he’s a United States senator, and it would be unseemly. . . . I’d interrupt him and say, ‘Shut up, John, you’re just a hick from Kentucky, and Mommy is giving you your medicine.’”
I was actually laughing out loud. Pamela Harriman came in from the front room to inquire about the hilarity. I had to wait until we were in the garden for Lorraine to finish the psychedelic report. “Mission accomplished. I think he liked it. He has been subdued lately, meditative. He has been speaking of civil rights more often, which is astonishing for someone from Kentucky.”
That was marvelous news for the planet, I said.
NOVEMBER 9
I began a new painting this morning. A circle of four muted colors against a black background. The black will suck in light from the colors, further muting them. Maybe it’s indicative of a somber mood I’ve been in of late. But I have been inspired to keep exploring color by the artist Kenneth Noland. I met him at Bebe Highsmith’s. He is a very attractive man, but a bit arrogant. I told him I had read Clement Greenberg’s essay on him in the Journal of American Art, and he didn’t seem to care. I asked how it felt to be called the inventor of a new form of abstraction. He just shrugged and looked at me without expression. I assumed he was a genius of some kind, and geniuses sometimes have no personalities, their everyday self extinguished to make way for the new reality inhabiting them. Finally, I said I didn’t understand much of the essay. What on earth did Greenberg mean, the destiny of painting was to approach pure self-referentiality?
Kenneth looked at me quizzically. “Who cares what it means? The essay did its job.”
I was stunned, then laughed, then yelled: “Bebe, what’s self-referentiality?”
She crunched her face. “Have another drink, Mary,” she said. “You must not be feeling well.”
NOVEMBER 16
Cord reappeared in my life. He arrived at the Wisners’ on Saturday night with Ibbie Kenna on his arm. Ibbie is a big, simple girl of the South with a statuesque behind and the continual scent of lavender. I assume she and Cord are dating, though my ex-husband has grown so difficult, so lasciviously vulgar in his drink, so obstreperous in his political pronouncements, that I question his viability as a date, let alone a mate. I question the patience with such behavior of my fellow Georgetown divorcées, of even Ibbie Kenna, even if my CIA ex-husband may appear to the naive as some version of James Bond, albeit ridiculously flawed.
Polly Wisner is careful not to invite Cord and me to the house at the same time, as she is a hostess supreme. But I have repeatedly told her that Cord is in the past, and the past doesn’t concern me. She shakes her head. “Only Mary,” she says. But she knows that Cord and her husband Frank are masterminds of Operation Mockingbird. Together, they have planted the Company’s hooks into journalists and organizations everywhere.
But Saturday was an exception. Saturday we coincided. Saturday we ended up in the same place at the same time, two birds standing on the same branch with drinks in our hands. I turned to leave, but he cornered me. He was not subtle in communicating that he had something to tell me; evolution has never selected men for subtlety. Secrets, yes, but not subtlety. I watched Ibbie Kenna peel off and chat up Arthur Schlesinger, who gazed way up at her approvingly. He seems fascinated by soaring women. Cord approached with the pomposity that was the air I breathed for so long, now gone like a long-absent odor from my life. He proclaimed that I have the CIA to thank for abstract art.
He rarely acknowledged that I was a painter when we were married, and has never acknowledged it since. But my days of being bullied were over.
“Well, please be kind enough to thank your comrades for their generosity,” I said, invoking as much Evangeline Bruce into my conversation as I had the capacity to muster.
“The CIA was, in fact, the world’s biggest booster of Abstract Expressionism.”
“Boosters of painting! And here I thought you were too busy lying and killing people!”
Cord has no ear for sarcasm. He so loves to go on, he must certainly love to go on Ibbie Kenna. But I cannot imagine what on earth he goes on about with her.
“Abstract art was our beachhead in the global war of culture.”
Cord loves such phrases. The global war of culture.
“When abstract art began—you know, that waste of paint you and your friends indulge in with your childish doodlings—”
“Cord, I have to go speak to Lorraine. I just remembered we have a squash game to arrange.”
“Hold on, hold on,” he said so confidently. “Just tell me which official institution was in the perfect position to celebrate the beatniks, bums, drunks, and Communists in your New York School of Abstract Expressionism?”
“It’s not my school. I work with the Washington Color School. You should come see our work sometime.”
“Yes, that’s right, it was all brought to you by the Company: lock, stock, and barrel. By the CIA. And your amigos Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning never knew a thing about it!”
He grabbed another drink from the server’s tray and gulped it down, like kerosene poured onto a roaring fire. “We just promoted it all over the world. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, through magazines, through writers, intellectuals, historians, and artists themselves, all bought and paid for by the CIA.”
The idea that this was a source of pride for him baffled me.
“And who was your greatest champion in the war to change art?” he demanded. “Who is the heavyweight champion of abstraction of the world?”
I was growing tired.
“Nelson Rockefeller. Yes, Abstract Expressionism is a Rockefeller family art form. He called it ‘free enterprise painting.’ He got his mummy’s museum behind it: the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All the founders—Paley, Whitney, Braden—they were all CIA. So your little art form, worthy of kindergarten children and New York alcoholics, suddenly becomes the international style of art. The signature art form of global capitalism, from Shanghai to San Francisco. And none of the artists ever knew!”
He paused, pleased with himself. He had given it to Mary once again, slipped it in when she least expected it, had co-opted and invalidated her art form, an art that lets such infinity in, that I consider it freedom on canvas. He had drawn a box around contemporary art to contain it, and me with it.
“Well, you are an artist, Cord. As long as you precede it with the word bullshit.”
I was unsprung. Restraints of deference to a man, deference to a husband, deference to an ex-husband, the dictates of gentility, the insidious mandate of polite society to be polite, they were gone. I am unprotected, but I am free. Cord may try to infiltrate me as he has infiltrated the culture, but I have entered a life where he has no jurisdiction.
He took a long puff on his Lucky Strike, and I watched again as the vapors disappeared into his glass eye.
“So the next time you and your boyfriend Kenneth Noland paint your little circles on canvas, you can thank the CIA.”
How does he know about Kenneth?
“I’ll remember to. If we can ever stop fucking.”
NOVEMBER 19
In bed, I told Jack I was glad to hear that Bobby had resigned from the Metropolitan Club when they refused to allow in a black man. He asked me to leave it alone, please.
“A century after slavery, they’re still keeping black men out of clubs? It’s sick.”
He asked me to leave it. He began rubbing my breast. Stop distracting me, turning me weak when I have a serious point to make. Why hasn’t Adlai Stevenson re
signed from the club? Or Dean Acheson? Or Mac Bundy? Jack says he can’t speak for other men. Jack says the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Then he asks me to bend toward justice and nudges the back of my neck. I pull his hand away. But we lie in bed, hugging. While I have him.
NOVEMBER 20
I know what I sound like. I sound like Amos Pinchot, my irate and irascible father. His raving nature reappears in my cells, boiling before the world. He ranted against war, even the war to stop Hitler. He ranted against monopolies and what he called the aggregates of business, assembled for the institutionalized robbery of common people. He ranted against denial of women of the right to vote. He was right. In each case, he was right, ranting for the righteous cause. But in the end, he got boring. Rants are boring. They leave no room for anybody else. Amos got boring, and when you get boring, you lose friends. Daddy had few when it was over. He was a pain in the ass. And I have become a pain in the ass. In bed with Jack, I suppose, I constitute a royal pain in the ass. So last night I kissed him and told him I would go easy on him from now on. “Thank the Lord, Mary,” he said.
NOVEMBER 25
I have never watched television, nor do I allow my sons to. I grew up riding horses beside waterfalls. I daydreamed in a castle and wandered naked through the foliage of Grey Towers. I perfected French, a vigorous game of tennis, and poetry. I came of age to tales of workers’ revolutions and the struggles of the proletariat, dinners of candlelight and radical, profound thinkers. I fail to see the hypnotic charm of flickering dots on a screen.
But I have seen Jack often enough on television by now to notice that he is an electronic chameleon. He seems ten years younger on TV than in the air. It is a new world for politicians, this TV, and he seems to have mastered it. His cool smile pours through the electrons and straight into your heart. Lincoln would not have been so successful on television, he of a more biblical age. But television seems to create a separate reality. I can’t quite fathom it, but I feel it. Someday it may become the only reality. Last night, when I came close to Jack’s skin, there was no television to annihilate the years. The wear on his face, the swollenness caused by medicine, the droop of his eyes, they all betrayed a wearying sadness.
Kenny O’Donnell had called. Jack wanted to see me, and they sent a car to pick me up. He was so tired when I arrived at the White House, but he brightened when I kissed him and he had a chance to smell me; a man wants to smell his woman every day. I think he may be smitten with me—that was the word Virginia Goodpastor used to use after every date at Vassar. But he seemed to have aged, even from just a week before, and he spoke from the bottom of a deep sea of concern.
“Two hundred million people would be killed in a confrontation with Russia,” he said.
I watched him silently and nodded. Sometimes I am simply a clearing for what he has to say.
“Two hundred million men, women, and children, with millions more dying from radioactive fallout. Sometimes I feel alone here, Mary.”
NOVEMBER 30
I met Edie Sedgwick at Timothy Leary’s office. She is my cousin on the Minturn side, and a sprite with dinner-plate eyes. I had flown to Boston to deliver my psychedelic progress report, my progress with Chantilly Lace and the wives of Washington, and when I entered Tim’s office on Divinity Avenue, Edie Sedgwick was there. She is part of a tribe who float in and out of Tim’s orbit these days, sharing a sort of drug haze. It is in fact quite fashionable now among young people to be passive and zombielike, and considered square to be bright and alert.
No wonder Tim’s situation with Harvard grows ever more precarious. He told me there is a dean who considers him a drug fiend and is determined to cut off his research funding. “This character wants to throw me out on the street—lock, stock, and consciousness!” Tim smiled, still appearing to know something everyone else doesn’t.
I whisper that Edie Sedgwick is my cousin, and that she appears not to have eaten for a while, and he whispers that she’s been institutionalized for anorexia. He’s attempting to cure her with LSD. I said maybe you could cure her with food, but he didn’t seem to hear. I remember him saying once his hearing was challenged, a souvenir of the war. He grinned at Edie as she placed a record on the hi-fi. She said she bought it in London, where it is all the rage, a band of four young British boys with long hair singing in harmony. It sounded a bit childish to me, but Tim was enthralled by it. Is he an open channel to the universe now, or have his faculties of discernment simply been permanently eroded? Edie sang along with the British boys as if in a trance.
She apparently spends a great deal of time in Harvard Square. It’s a new trend among kids to don odd outfits and inhabit the street doing nothing whatsoever, a kind of proclamation that all traditional purposes and activities are dead, and they await without impatience what comes next. She says she studies sculpture, and when I ask her what kind, she says, “Kinetic.”
Edie is a skinny boy-girl who seems disconnected from gravity. Maybe she is the model for a new kind of human, sprung free from the machinery of personality. I mention the Minturns, Daddy Amos’s family by marriage, but she says she is unconcerned with the accidents and fictional construct of family. I know there has been great wealth but also a heavy family destiny laid on her tiny shoulders, and the death gene that claimed the soul of my sister Rosamond seems to circulate in our family. Both of Edie’s brothers have committed suicide, and I worry about her. I kiss her in a sudden flare-up of tenderness and because she is family, but she is cold and unresponsive. She says LSD has taught her there is no purpose in identifying with the story that inhabits your body—it is all quite foolish, and soon she will be leaving for New York to become a model. She is a flora and faun of these times, and I wonder what destiny awaits her in Manhattan.
DECEMBER 2
Jack exploded in me. It was a rage inside him, exaggerated I am convinced by the drugs they’re shooting into him. To Jack’s catalog of illness, Kenny says they have added autoimmune disease, for which they are injecting massive doses of hydrocortisone and steroids. So I may simply be the object of pharmaceutically induced passion, but Jack pounds with a force akin to desperation and is spent very quickly. Robin Nightingale once whispered to me at a party that sex with Jack Kennedy was the best twenty seconds of her life.
DECEMBER 8
Vangie Bruce is a woman endowed with such élan and elegance, Christian Dior personally designed a maternity dress for her. I stopped in to see her at her brick castle for a progress report on Chantilly Lace. When I climbed the tiny flight of exterior stairs and walked through the door with the half-round window above, it was like entering a new world. Actually, it was like entering an old world. She and Ambassador Bruce maintain a punishing entertainment schedule, in a salon redolent of an ancient European grandeur.
Vangie’s home and her body are permanently magazine-ready. All traces of this tawdry twentieth century have been banished from her living room. The silk taffeta curtains that camouflage her windows are from England. The tawny-pink walls carry heavy, murky classical paintings. The house feels more like a dusty museum than a home. And even as I visited at noon and she sat reclining on her divan, her commanding head of hair was perfectly styled and she sat in repose in a moss-green dress, her long legs propped in front of her.
“Well, we did it,” she said. I hugged her because I knew we had accomplished an important step. “David took the LSD, I hovered around him, and he actually enjoyed it. I had no idea this acid or what you call it was something you could actually enjoy. He falls asleep when he drinks red wine. I thought it was some kind of endurance test that scrambled your brains, and you hope, when it’s over, you can still recognize your name. I sat by the phone the entire time, ready to call who knows who, but David just grinned and looked around, bemused.
“He said it made normal life seem rather shabby. I played Mahler’s Sixth Symphony the whole time, and he sat in his big fluffy armchair. At one point he said the orchestra was playing inside
him, his body was a concert hall, that in fact everything was inside him, or outside him, he didn’t really know the difference.”
I told Vangie what a great a job she had done, that we were changing the trajectory of the world, turning on one important man at a time. “I’m so glad something turns him on,” she said with her big laugh and cloud of cigarette smoke. “We almost did it, if you know what I mean, but he couldn’t find it!”
CHRISTMAS DAY 1962
Quentin and Mark are asleep upstairs. The sweaters I knitted sit unopened under the tree. My sons will sneer when they open the boxes; Mark wants a Meccano robot man, and who knows what Quentin wants, what does a seventeen-year-old want these days? But I don’t believe in frivolous presents.
Later we will go to the Bruces’ for Christmas open house. For now, I sit with Evangeline on my lap and think about another New Year. How do I bring myself into sharper focus, unblurred by men? I have been blurred by two men, two soldiers who returned from war with pieces missing. Some of the missing pieces were biological, pertaining to functions of anatomy. Others were invisible, pertaining to the delicate capacity to allow life to soak through you and feel it. Neither Cord Meyer nor Jack Kennedy possesses the capacity to be intimate with a woman. My good fortune. And indeed, it is the fortune of most of my friends. Pain closes hearts. War builds armor. And the women of my generation have been trained to accept these limitations as eternal masculine truths. But I have always judged the paralyzed psyches of both my husband and my lover as casualties of war rather than imperatives of evolution.
Cord and Jack were each hailed as the promise of their generation, growing up in the spotlight of attention. They were discussed, they were profiled, they were written about. How odd to live in both their shadows, first one and then the other. When Cord lost his eye in Guam, and his twin brother in Okinawa, and his dreams of world peace in the brutal machinations of a cold war, his youthful promise degenerated, a promise ultimately measurable in cigarettes, alcohol, and espionage.
