by Paul Wolfe
Jack’s fall from a golden youth never seemed as steep, Jack never having felt so deeply, perhaps, in the first place. And it became my destiny to love this man, a man who hated being touched. Whose sexual obsessions had no time or inclination to honor the desires of a woman.
Such were the men of our generation who came home from war. As Lorraine Cooper says, we await the men of the future with open legs.
1963
JANUARY 2
Jackie’s in Greece. Kenny O’Donnell called last night, asking me to return to the White House. Climbing into the car taking me to Pennsylvania Avenue, I pictured Jackie navigating the islands of Homer with giant sunglasses and a silk scarf wrapped tightly around her head, a mummy in sunlight. We all have our paradises to bear.
Jack was in the rocking chair when I arrived. It is a beautiful old rocker, but someone sewed what looks like tiny seat cushions onto the armrests. Now it is an odd-looking specimen of furniture. Jack was in a reflective mood, the force field of male electricity that usually sets off sparks in my body absent. Had we moved from the fugitive fields of Eros to the cozy meadows of companionship without first passing through a marriage license?
He lit a cigar and said that little Caroline was madly in love with a puppy that Khrushchev had sent for her birthday.
“A Bolshevik beagle?” I asked.
“No, I think it’s a Dachshund.”
Jack has the worst German accent I have ever heard.
He grew solemn. I kissed him on the cheek and lit a cigarette. He said he would not preside over the destruction of humanity, and I nodded, eager to listen. But . . . there is always a but. The word seems inherent in the design of human thought. “But despite what you and Sorensen and Stevenson keep telling me, there’s no turning back in Berlin. We can’t turn back. Berlin is like a shining island in this grim ocean of Communism. We can’t turn back the clock and run.”
I could hear Joe Alsop’s voice speaking through him. Joe is a soft man pushing a hard line, and Jack listens to him. He’s just a newspaper columnist and a pigheaded opinionmonger at that, but I think Jack finds him comforting. The patrician speech, the haughty aspect, the pompous WASPness—I think they all remind Jack of the other Joe in his life, Daddy Joe Kennedy.
“I think you’re listening to Joe Alsop too much. He’s a broken record. Nobody likes Communism, but despite its dangers, once in while you have to shut up.”
My friend Joe’s bellicose views on Russia are putting us all in danger, but I know the source of his hatred. I know Joe Alsop’s dark secret, and he doesn’t know I know. I abhor secrets, I believe secrets defy the grace of living, but I inhabit a community of secrets, so many secrets surround me, and one of them pertains to Joe Alsop.
It is just this: the KGB set Joe up one day when he was in Russia. That’s it. They secretly photographed him in a hotel room off Red Square, sucking the cock of a handsome young Bolshevik. The photo now hangs over Joe Alsop’s head, the blow job of Damocles. Encouraged to come clean by the CIA operatives for whom he works—ah yes, the cascading disclosure of secrets within secrets—he informed both the FBI and the CIA of the incident. It diminished the threat of blackmail, but he knows that one day the photograph will show up in the wrong mailbox. Until then, all Joe can do is hate Russians and employ his newspaper column and the salons of Georgetown to ratchet up the vehemence of the Cold War.
“I think I have to go to Berlin,” Jack said.
JANUARY 5
Fucking orchids. I have always loathed orchids. This is my floral peculiarity, even as it is James Angleton’s peculiar obsession to cultivate them. I wrote a short story in college where a woman stands horrified at the orchids she beholds in the window of a flower shop. “They look as though they had been grown in damp underground caves by demons. They’re evil sickly flowers with no life of their own, living on borrowed strength.”
At Vonnie Klaxton’s poetry reading last night, as Cicely and I leafed through the program, James turned to me and said: “Did you know that deception is the saving grace of orchids?”
“The saving grace of orchids,” I repeated. “Now that’s a good title for a poem.”
“It’s not the fittest orchid that survives. It’s the most deceptive.” James seemed delighted that the need for deception extends to the flowery realm. “The perpetuation of the orchid species depends on an orchid’s ability to misrepresent itself to insects.”
“Have you read Vonnie’s new collection, Marginalia from Paris?” I said, trying to deflect him, but his insane intensity, his paean to the deceit of orchids, continued.
“Orchids have no food to offer insects,” he said. “So they have to deceive them into landing on them and carrying their pollen to another orchid in the tribe. Don’t you love that?”
“Enough about orchids, James,” said Cicely. “Vonnie’s about to read.”
But he continued. “To accomplish their deception, orchids use their color, their shape, and their odor to attract insects to their pollen.” He looked at me intimately through his owlish spectacles. “Orchids play on the sexual instincts of insects.”
An auspicious beginning to the new year: listening to the CIA head of counterintelligence utter the words “Orchids play on the sexual instincts of insects.” But James Jesus Angleton is singular. As Cicely devotes herself to the cultivation and breeding of words in her poetry, James traffics in a twisted netherworld of motives. I realized that besides the fervent pursuit of double agents, his two great loves are fly fishing and orchids. Fly fishing is the art of fooling fish into believing artificial flies are real. Orchids survive only by deceiving insects into carrying their pollen. James is a creature born of immaculate deception.
JANUARY 6
I am leafing through the poems in Marginalia from Paris. They are so delicate and subtly observed. I love this one.
As We Vanish
As we vanish
I speak to your eyelids
and tell them I’m glad
they’re there,
unwitnessed
and meekly following
some organic plan
of composition.
And yet your eyelids
(as we vanish)
move sometimes
and witness
through historical air
the stones and Parisian statues
also vanishing
but majestically.
I will tell them so
next time I see your eyes.
JANUARY 9
Crisis alters the trajectory of thought. As the Cuban missiles recede into history and the world offers us a new beginning called 1963, I have begun to rethink Cord’s turning. I have come to think of idealism not so much as a virtue Cord lost on the way down but as the very cause of his descent.
Idealism is simply a state of mind where the representation becomes more important than the reality. (Have these lectures I conduct regularly in my head grown boring?) Cord always considered women singularly unsuited for abstract thought, his wife especially so, but I recognize that Cord’s views on thought say more about his brain than mine. I am an abstract painter who also entertains abstract ideas.
Idealism, then, is a state of mind where life is forced into a straitjacket constructed purely of thought. And reality is sacrificed at the altar of a picture. The picture doesn’t in fact exist; it is a figment of the neurons of the brain. In the diabolical brain of my ex-husband, the neurons coagulated into a dark picture entitled The Communist Menace, and then they recoagulated into a picture called The American Way of Life. Within his mind, the two pictures are engaged in holy war, and in the name of those pictures, Cord would do some bad things. Good people do good things, they say, and bad people do bad things, but when good people do bad things, that takes idealism.
Maybe Timothy Leary knew this back in 1946. Tim Leary and Cord Meyer actually crossed paths back then, at veterans’ meetings in Berkeley where the boys who served in war came home to build a peace. They tried to
work together, but Cord fought with everyone. He imposed his cranky opinions mercilessly; he thwarted Tim at every turn. He proved to be an impossible partner. That realization still awaited my discovery many years later in marriage, but back then, in Berkeley, Timothy Leary finally quit. “Cord is an absolute fanatic,” he said of the man who would one day become my ex-husband. “A real monster-machine.”
The day would come when I would meet Timothy Leary and explore LSD with him, and together we would envision a new future for our planet. I would never tell him who I had been married to.
JANUARY 14
“What does Adlai Stevenson have, anyway?” Jack asks me. He is fascinated by the sex lives of other men. Sometimes I think he is still the boy with scarlet fever, stranded in his bed alone, reading Sir Walter Scott, dreaming of playing outside with his big brother Joe and the other boys.
“This guy is half bald,” he complains. “He wears dumpy suits, has this giant paunch, yet women love him. He has a harem.”
“Adlai actually cares about women,” I tell him. “He actually listens when they speak. He thinks they’re intelligent.”
“I knew there was something wrong with him,” Jack says.
“As a matter of fact,” I reply, “I’m on my way to see Adlai right now. All the way with Adlai! That was his slogan, right?”
Jack shifts focus effortlessly and instantaneously, and Cuba far outweighs Adlai Stevenson’s paunch in his preoccupations. “I’m going through back channels to Castro,” he says quietly. He is entrusting me with secrets, and I am honoring the trust. “Bill Attwood is in Havana talking to him now. If this got out, we’d be barbecued.”
I tell him my peace-crusading daddy always said that as long as you’re talking, you’re not shooting. But I can’t help remembering a dance at Choate so long ago, when Bill Atwood was my date and Jack an interloper, a lecherous snot who kept cutting in on us. Now Bill is in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro, and Jack is lying next to me in a White House bed. How frivolously time juggles us all.
JANUARY 16
Roxanne Arcturis says the gates of ether are opening, and women will have an intimate relationship with the Divine Feminine. “This intimacy creates escalating awareness in the realms of love, beauty, and relationship,” she says. I have known skirt chasers, lotharios, suave seducers, grabbers, gropers, Don Juans, and feeler-uppers, but I never met a man who would call the feminine divine. Maybe I have looked in all the wrong places. How lovely it would be to experience the Divine Feminine while I still breathed on earth.
JANUARY 21
Jack and I lounged on fur in the yellow Oval Room. It was once Truman’s study, till Jackie redecorated it. Now it has a big white couch in the center, engulfed by a luscious blanket of yellow fur. I don’t wear fur, but I love lying on it, especially after pulling Jack’s shoes off, especially after pushing him down and snuggling with him. I was wondering who else might Jack snuggle with on a blanket of fur. Nobody, I was convinced. Then my mouth ruined the mood. My mouth does many things, and one of them is ruin moods. I mentioned Berlin.
I told him I knew the German city was this great citadel of freedom—I sounded like Joe Alsop orating at the dinner table—and I know Berlin is Jack’s gorgeous shop window for capitalism, but it was no excuse for war. War is obsolete in the atomic age.
I could feel Jack stiffen on the fur and pull away. “You can’t appease the Russians,” he said quietly.
I’m not trying to appease the Russians, I felt like saying, but it would have sounded absurd.
“But I don’t think Khrushchev wants to annihilate seventy million people in ten minutes. He has to posture for the hardliners in the Kremlin, just like I have to deal with Curtis LeMay and the loon Lemnitzer. ‘Bomb the fucking enemy into submission!’ That’s all these SOBs know. ‘You have nukes, so nuke the bastards!’ And these guys sleep very well at night.”
I told Jack that presidents have always led their countries to glory through war. It would be his destiny to reverse history and lead his country to glory by avoiding war, by fending off the maniacs in the Pentagon and old fossils in the Senate who liked sending other people’s sons to die. Strontium-90 from nuclear testing was already showing up in the bones and teeth of children.
“Mary, I’ve had McNamara make it clear innumerable times that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the US or its allies. We are not contemplating preventative war.” Jack said this as if he were at a press conference, though we still lay looking up at the chandelier and holding hands.
Then he told me his back was bad, and we lay in silence. I love being so comfortable together we don’t have to say anything. I wondered if he has these moments with Jackie, and then realized that I keep comparing myself to her, and that these thoughts are automatic. Comparisons arise from fear and weakness, so I took two marijuana cigarettes from my purse and handed one to Jack. We sat up against the back of the couch, and he took a silver lighter from his pocket. I watched the presidential seal on the lighter glow in flame, here in the holy of holies, and I had a sudden fear of fur igniting in the White House and the world holding me responsible for killing the president. He held out the lighter for me, and I inhaled long and deep. It burned my throat, and I coughed.
“I’ve done cocaine at Peter Lawford’s in Santa Monica,” he said, “but pot is my special form of fun with you.”
“It’s for your back.”
“You’re a bad girl, Mary, Mary.”
“Life’s either a great adventure or nothing much at all. That’s what my daddy used to say.”
One joint was quite enough, almost too much. Any more, and I would have felt my brain dissolve. There’s that point with pot where the senses are alive one moment, and the next, you are suddenly in anguish. My senses did spring to life, the chatter in my mind stopped, my body felt wrapped in fur from the inside as well as the outside, and Jack seemed far away. I suddenly ached to be filled. I lay back and pulled Jack on top of me, he was shining into my eyes, he was smiling like a little Irish boy on his first date, it was so crazy doing it on a couch in this round room. All these circles. We were in an oval room, and I stared up at a round chandelier, an avalanche of gold and crystal hanging down over our heads, though Jack didn’t see it because he saw only my face, and not even that, because his mouth and mine were joined.
JANUARY 24
Of course, I could spend my time knitting sweaters for the boys. I could travel to the playing fields of Massachusetts and cheer lacrosse games. I could immerse myself in painting, slurp bourbon, flirt with men, and call it a day. But something haunts me.
I was a tiny girl at Grey Towers—I don’t remember how old I was, it must have been summertime. A man named Bob La Follette was staying at the house, visiting Amos. Later, they told me he had run for president. Later, they told me he was a great man who fought his entire life to end child labor, to preserve civil liberties, to end US imperialism in Latin America. But I don’t remember any of those things. All I remember is that Bob La Follette lifted me up that day, hoisted me on his shoulders, and took me out walking to the waterfalls. They were the loudest crashing thing I had ever heard, and I was frightened by the sheer power of water. Then he swung me up in the air in front of him. I felt like I was flying, the cool water was crashing behind me, and Bob La Follette said to me: “Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done. Or done over. Will you remember that?”
I promised him I would remember, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about. But I remember. I promised.
The only hope for the world is intelligent women.
JANUARY 30
I was drinking a strawberry milkshake at Packer’s and reading Look magazine. What is more blissful than a smooth sweet drink and a magazine? Arnie, the soda jerk, puts extra sugar in my shake, which probably goes directly to my hips, if the articles I read are correct, but I am addicted to sugar. Other articles say sugar is good for you, but I believe they
are written by the sugar industry. Why are humans the only species who crave what isn’t good for them?
Jackie was on the cover of Look. The piece was entitled: “The First Lady inspires the new international look.” Having been a journalist, I can attest that this is what’s called filler in the business, an illusion of news having no more substance than my milkshake. Then Pamela Harriman walked by.
Pamela is an intimidating presence, even if she reached her exalted status climbing a ladder built of men. Who said “Pamela Harriman has become a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings”?
“Mary, I think you should leave this drug business alone,” she said.
I was taken aback. I told her the world was about to shift on its axis, and we either change with the world or the world will change without us.
“You talk like a beatnik, Mary, which is cute, but I must say you and your CIA ex-husband suffer from the same disease.”
“Which is?”
“The belief that there is actually a secret to life. And that it is discoverable. And that in finding it out, we can escape.”
“Escape from what?”
“Life. Reality. Mary, you actually think you can rewrite the rules. You think there is an escape route out of here, and there isn’t, my dear, there isn’t. Utopias and rainbowism are the province of children, drunks, and madmen. Here’s the secret, Mary: You just get on with it. That’s the secret. You get on with it. You can take drugs, you can meditate, you can levitate, you can go to Tibet, you can go with your sister to her Gurdjieff meetings. But you won’t find out why we suffer. And you surely won’t find out why we die.”
“You have become cynical, Pamela.”
“And what precisely does cynical mean, my dear? The insistence on seeing things as they are rather than how they should be? Yes, I learned a long time ago how to please a man. Because that’s the only way a woman can get ahead. I wanted wealth, and I wanted power, and those are big ambitions. Am I a startling beauty, dear? Are you enthralled by my formidable wit? I know who I am. I just got on with it. I never stopped. I played the cards I was dealt, if you want to put it vulgarly, Mary.”
