by Gore Vidal
Theodore Roosevelt had rushed to town to address the National Press Club. He had denounced the War Department that had refused his services and, indirectly, the President. He had been scornful, as usual, of Wilson’s “peace without victory”; and declared, “Let us dictate peace by the hammering guns and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters.” At the time, Caroline had duly noted the first verb. But Blaise had vetoed a Tribune essay on the necessity or non-necessity of a dictator in time of war, something that such a pacific figure as Harding of Ohio thought desirable. In American life there had been no Bonapartes or sun kings—only the ambiguous Lincoln. If nothing else, because of their French birth, Caroline and Blaise had been inoculated against that virus. But Henry Adams’s brother Brooks had apparently succumbed. “He cries like an infant for a dictator,” said Adams, a faint smile perceptible within the beard. “Then he howls, like Cabot, whenever Wilson does anything dictatorial. There is no pleasing my brother.”
“Or you?”
“Oh, I delight, humbly, in the crash of all that I have ever held dear. But I’ve always been boringly in advance of everyone. Poor Brooks considers the world to be going to the devil with the greatest rapidity, and I console him, as best I can, in my merry way, by telling him that the world went there ten years ago.”
“That is consolation.” Caroline found it hard to believe that Uncle Henry, as he was known to her without quotation marks, would be eighty in a few weeks.
Adams picked up a slender volume. “You know George Santayana?”
Caroline nodded. Half-Spanish, half-Boston, he had taught philosophy at Harvard alongside, when not at odds with, Henry James’s brother William. He had written a number of works on the reason of life or the life of reason. Caroline had never read him; but she remembered vividly the dark shining eyes at their one Boston meeting.
“He’s just written some very elegant propaganda. No doubt inspired by the great Theodore. Aileen, do read the marked page.” As she took the book from Adams, he turned his still-bright gaze upon Caroline. “I am now blind.”
“No,” Caroline began.
“Yes.” Adams was matter-of-fact. “Three months ago, the light went out. Do read, Aileen.”
Miss Tone obliged. “ ‘In their tentative many-sided way the Germans have been groping for four hundred years towards a restoration of their primitive heathenism.’ ”
Adams interrupted. “Now that makes sense. Remember, the Teutonic tribes were the last to be Christianized, and they still resent the experience. That’s why, ever since, they have been at war, in one way or another, with Christendom.”
“You make them sound most sympathetic.” Caroline had been painlessly separated from Christianity by Mlle. Souvestre; and had no longings.
“You are a Bolshevik, I suppose. That’s the latest thing. It’s also the future thing. Brooks is right. We have lived to see the end of a republican form of government, which is, after all, merely an intermediate stage between monarchy and anarchy, between the Czar and the Bolsheviks.”
“Everyone says you’ve become a Roman Catholic,” announced Alice Longworth, as she entered the room with her stepmother, Edith—“long-suffering Edith” was the Homeric tag Caroline mentally attached to the older woman, who had coped marvelously well with five boys of whom the most tiresome was her husband, while relations with Alice were always edgy.
Adams greeted the ladies warmly. “I’ve heard the rumor, too. My conversion is a German war-aim, and will fail like everything else they put their hand to. ‘Subjectivity in thought,’ as Santayana describes them, ‘and willfulness in morals.’ ”
“Is that you, Uncle Henry?” Alice had not heard the “them.”
“No. The Germans. I think poor Springy started the rumor about me, to liven our spirits.”
“I do miss him,” said Alice.
Edith took the throne by the fire where, in earlier days, Clara Hay had always sat; now Clara was dead and of the original Five of Hearts only Adams remained. “Theodore thinks Mr. Wilson had him sent home, out of spite.”
“Theodore would think that.” Adams was mild. “I’m sorry he couldn’t come. Politics?”
“What else?” Edith sighed. “He sits in poor Alice’s dining room like a pasha, and they all come to him. He’s with the New York delegation now. He wears himself out. And his stomach is upset.”
“Wait till he dines tonight with cousin Eleanor and the wrong Roosevelt.” Alice’s gray-blue eyes glittered in the winter light from Lafayette Park. “Eleanor has become the Lucrezia Borgia of Washington—none survives her table.”
To Caroline’s surprise, they were joined by no one. “I want you three all to myself,” said Adams. “I’m tired of men, and allergic to politicians, and grow rabid at the sight of a uniform.”
“All my brothers are overseas. Father is jealous.”
“Yes.” Adams’s voice was, for an instant, ominous. But then he lightened the mood. “You’ll doubtless be calling on your successor across the road.” He put his arm through Edith’s and led them into the dining room, where his usual late breakfast or early lunch was set up.
“Oh, you can imagine that.” Edith was amused. “I suspect I’m the last person she’d want to see, coming in the door like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“They say,” said Alice, who always said what they were saying, “that her brothers are stealing everything that’s not nailed down.”
“Now, Alice.” Edith’s voice was both weary and warning.
“Mother insists that if you were not actually in the room during the crime it could not have happened.” But Alice dropped the subject. Edith was the only person who seemed to intimidate her; certainly, her father did not. Once criticized for Alice’s escapades, the then President had famously said, “I can regulate my daughter or I can preside over the United States. But I cannot do both.”
As Adams and Edith exchanged news—illness, funerals, wills—Alice murmured to Caroline, “Franklin thinks Eleanor doesn’t know, and I think she does.”
Caroline’s response was swift. “She wouldn’t say if she knew.”
Alice was surprised. “Why not?”
“I would have to tell you all about our mutual schoolteacher …”
“The atheist Mlle. Souvestre. I know. I think I really know.” Alice’s malice had the same sort of joyous generalized spontaneity as did her father’s hypocrisy.
Caroline let the bait slip by. “Eleanor will notice nothing until there is something to notice, and it is my guess, as a fellow Catholic, de la famille, that Lucy Mercer will not go to bed with Franklin until she is safely married.”
Alice was deeply interested by so European, so papist a viewpoint. “You mean married to Franklin?”
“Preferably. But marriage to anyone makes adultery a possibility, even a necessity. Don’t you think?”
Alice, for the first time in Caroline’s long experience of her, blushed. Plainly, a lucky hit. But if Alice had found a lover she had been superbly discreet. “At last I understand vice. We Americans are so much simpler. If it itches, scratch it. But no fuss, no divorces, no marriages—I mean, just for that I saw them together, out driving, Franklin and Lucy, coming from Chevy Chase. I told Franklin I’d seen them, and that he’d almost wrecked the car staring at her, and he said, cool as could be, ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ I have them to the house, when Eleanor’s out of town.” Alice frowned. “But they could never marry each other. She’s Catholic. He isn’t.”
“Worse. She’s Catholic. He’s political. He can’t have a career and be divorced.” Caroline had always felt that Eleanor’s position was impregnable, thanks to Franklin’s astonishing ambition—astonishing because, amiable and charming as he was, he seemed curiously lacking in any real political sense, as he had recently demonstrated when he ran for senator from New York, only to be sunk without a trace by the Hearst-Tammany money machine. Luckily, he still had his job at the Navy Department; still had the magical name.
>
Henry Adams and Edith Roosevelt were bemoaning the loss of Springy.
“He was best man at our wedding in London. I don’t think Theodore has ever had so wise a friend.”
“Nor I so civilized a one.” Adams mournfully ate cornbread, a dish that Caroline delighted in only at his table. “Springy’s great unsung contribution was his manipulation of the Jewish bankers in New York—and their press. Almost to a man, they were for the Kaiser …”
“The editor of the New York Times did hold out.” Caroline had been much involved in the newspaper intrigues of 1914. Kuhn, Loeb & Company had threatened to take over the pro-Allies Times, while other pressures were brought to bear on the press by Jacob Schiff and the American brother of the German Warburgs. Wilson had steered a delicate course. A number of pro-German Jewish bankers had given money to his campaign, assuming that he would “keep us out of war” against their beloved Germany. Wilson had mollified them by appointing Warburg to the Federal Reserve Board and the country’s leading Zionist, Louis Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Caroline had been present at the White House when Wilson suddenly quoted Scripture to Spring Rice: “ ‘He that keepeth Israel shall neither shun her nor sleep.’ ”
“Springy can also take credit for Mr. Balfour’s note of last November, when he undid all the zealous work of Christendom by restoring Holy Zion to the Jews. I believe Mr. Schiff now plans to rebuild the Temple, out of his own pocket.”
“But surely you must be a Zionist, Uncle Henry.” Like everyone in Washington, Alice knew that the very thought of the Jews made Adams apoplectic. “They will then all be in one place which you won’t ever have to visit.”
But Adams saw fit to respond, sweetly. “But I do want to visit. And now that the British have taken Jerusalem away from the Turks, I wish to gaze reverently upon our holy of holies, the petrified heart of Christendom.”
“I think, Henry,” said Edith Roosevelt in the tone that she used to quiet her husband, “that you are becoming blasphemous …”
“… at breakfast, too,” Alice added.
Aileen Tone changed the subject. Caroline thought of love and age. Lately, she found that she had become like every other woman of her acquaintance and age, totally self-absorbed. Only that morning, Emma had said, “You must stop staring at yourself in mirrors.”
Caroline had rallied sufficiently to say, “How else can I see myself, except in a mirror?”
“You are intolerable,” said Emma, now in her second year at Bryn Mawr; and interested in mathematics. But that was Emma’s problem. Caroline had now become Caroline’s problem. Of course, there was a way to see oneself other than in a mirror and that was on the screen. Caroline, Caroline decided, looking down at the pale blind ancient Henry Adams, was not herself, was mad. At the door to the study, she suddenly kissed Adams on the cheek.
“Try not to forget us,” the old man said. Thus the fifth and final Heart bade Caroline farewell.
2
A recent bombardment had shattered a grove of trees, stripping them of leaves, branches. In the diffuse light, they looked like a company of dead men stripped of flesh. Between the trees, there were trenches, demarked by barbed wire. On the ground, the dead, American dead. Some looked as if they were asleep. Some stared in horror at the end. Some were unidentifiable as to species.
The Red Cross nurse moved slowly through the woods. From time to time, she would stop at a figure on the ground; stare hard at the face. She wore a dark cloak, creased and soiled; and a man’s muddy boots. Finally, at the edge of the grove, she knelt beside a body. She reached out a hand as if to touch the forehead of the staring face. Then stopped; froze.
“Cut!” Tim’s megaphoned voice was authoritative. “That was lovely, Emma.”
Caroline—known to the studio and “in art” as Emma Traxler—stood up and stepped off the set and into the bright Santa Monica sun. The gray diffuse light of Belleau Wood in France was the work of a gauze net over a platform where skeletal trees and living dead men and lifeless dummies had been carefully arranged by Timothy X. Farrell and his art director.
“Set up the close shot.” Tim turned to Caroline. “We have a visitor. Mr. Ince himself.”
An agreeable man not yet forty, Thomas H. Ince was a legend, as he might have put it, in his own time. With Griffith and Mack Sennett, he was Triangle Films. In name, Ince wrote, directed, produced. In practice he supervised most of the studio’s productions, now working overtime to supply America’s hunger for the movies. Here, at Santa Monica, he had built a self-contained village-studio, created solely for the making of photo-plays indoors and out. But Inceville, as it was called more seriously than not by everyone including its creator, was already too small and a new studio village was being constructed some miles to the south at Culver City.
Caroline’s first discovery had been that there was no Hollywood in the sense of a movie capital, only villages set in orange groves and onion fields with dusty roads to connect them. As the studio closest to the sea, Inceville was the pleasantest of all the thirty or forty studios.
Triangle’s principal rival and soon-to-be owner, Famous Players–Lasky, occupied a small barn-like structure near the corner of Sunset and Vine Street; and it was here, in a blaze of klieg lights (named for the brothers Kliegl: “Who kicked the T out of the Kliegls?” old-timers liked to proclaim) that famous plays were photographed with famous players, the first of whom had been Sarah Bernhardt, who played both Queen Elizabeth and La Dame aux Camélias. According to Caroline’s French brother Plon, when Bernhardt saw her portly self on screen, she had fainted with horror. “But then,” Plon had added, “we all did. Out of respect.”
Currently, the world’s greatest photo-play star was under contract to Famous Players. At twenty-five, Mary Pickford was still playing pubescent long-haired girls, for which she had been given a million dollars for two years of her time by the Messrs. Zukor and Lasky. She had already made The Little American, to the delight of George Creel, and now she was in something called M’liss. Patriotism was abroad in the land, and Caroline was now doing more than her part in a seven-reel photo-play that would, Mr. Ince assured her, “make a fortune. I know. I can tell. But don’t ask me how.”
Beneath an umbrella, Ince and Caroline were served tea, while the six-man orchestra, which was used on the set to inspire the actors, now played light dance music. In the first of Caroline’s many weeping scenes, she had discovered, as so many amateurs do, that it is difficult to weep on cue. Tim had suggested that she think of someone close to her dead. She thought of her daughter, Emma; not a tear came. She thought of Plon, who was dead; and scowled, with anger, that she should have lost him in so stupid a war. The orchestra was asked to help inspire tears. The conductor, a violinist, said, “I have just the thing. Mary and Doug and Mr. Chaplin all cry like babies when I play.…” With that, the orchestra, standing in a hospital set where the wounded and the dying were being ministered to by Caroline, played “Danny Boy,” and Caroline laughed. Finally, a stick of camphor was given to Héloise, who held it close to Caroline’s face, so that the pungent fumes would make tears while the orchestra softly played “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” The result had been deeply satisfying for Caroline; and authentic, too, according to the delighted Tim.
“The question is …” But Caroline was then obliged to shut her mouth as the make-up man repainted her face, starting with the lips. Caroline no longer looked at herself in mirrors. If she wanted to see herself she could watch the rushes. But after staring at herself on the screen for half an hour on the first day, she had had enough. She allowed herself to be painted by others; moved here and there at Tim’s orders; and dressed as the wardrobe mistress decreed. Luxuriously, she had given herself up. Let them invent her.
“The question is, how long can we keep you a secret? But then, you tell me. You’re a publisher, Mrs. Sanford. You know more about that than we do.”
“Not really.” The mouth had been finished; now the lines about her eyes were be
ing painted over. “It’s bound to come out, and I don’t mind at all if … well, if I’m not too shameful.”
Ince stared at her appreciatively, as if she were a work of art that he had got on loan from a museum. Caroline had seen the same look many times on Hearst’s face. “No chance of that. And believe me I’d tell you if there was any danger for you, because it’s all on my head, too. No, you’re a novelty, and that always works. We’ve got a raft of Russian royalty out here, all trying to get work with us. Even the socialites are showing interest. Just had a message from Mrs. Lydig Hoyt that she might do a photo-play or two, as war-work.”
“Your cup,” said Caroline, who knew the New York lady, “runneth over.”
“But where she’s just a society name, good for some ballyhooly in the press, you have this face.” He looked suddenly sad. “Wasted, if you’ll forgive me, all these years when we could have used you. Oh, how we could have used you! Like Marguerite Clark …”
“Not Mary Pickford?” Now that Caroline had entered a world of perfect fantasy, she was subject to all sorts of irrational likes and dislikes that she would never have entertained in the real world. Mary Pickford, almost young enough to be her daughter, was the chief rival to be overthrown, while the Gish sisters’ wistful charm enraged her.
“Not Mary. There’s only one of her, and considering what she costs, there may not even be one of her much longer. No. You’re something that really hasn’t happened before—a woman of forty who looks younger, of course—”
“Who looks her age.”
“Whatever. But looks extraordinarily beautiful on screen. We’ve had a lot of famous actresses who were around the bend, like they say, starting with Bernhardt. But you’re not an actress. You’re unknown—to the public, anyway—and you’re playing your age …”
“And here is my son.”
