by Gore Vidal
“Jess, tell Harry we’ll meet at H Street after supper. So round up the boys.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” George Christian appeared in the doorway. “Can you see Senator Borah and Senator Day, after lunch?”
“Well, can I? You’re the fellow who knows.”
“Yes, sir. I can fit them in. Senator Borah says it’s important.”
“Everything to do with Mr. Borah’s important,” said the Duchess. “He’s a scandal the way he and Alice Longworth are carrying on, not that Nick cares, but poor Mrs. Borah’s a martyr, I say …”
Harding nodded to Christian, who disappeared; as did Jess. Although he liked to say he hated offices, he very much enjoyed the one that Daugherty had given him on the sixth floor of the Department of Justice. He was paid no salary but he could write letters on Justice Department stationery and, best of all, he had access to the files. In a city where who knew what was all that mattered, he was becoming very knowledgeable indeed. Finally, as right hand to the President’s right hand (Daugherty had a private line to the President’s office), every door opened for him as he went about his business, which was to keep the money rolling in.
2
The family dining room smelled of wieners and sauerkraut, one of Burden’s favorite meals. The President received them at the head of the cleared table. He was chewing on a toothpick and he seemed to Burden to have grown, literally, in office. It was not so much that he was stouter—like a glacier, the high stomach had moved another inch up his rib cage—as the aura of largeness about him, the large bronze face, the thick white hair, the black eyebrows, the sense of perfect equilibrium. Burden wondered if, by design, they had all been led to underestimate Harding—by his design.
Certainly Harding’s first message to Congress had made it very clear that not only was he the president but he was not about to yield any of his powers to the legislative branch, particularly to that Senate which was supposed to have created him. Twice, he had publicly made fun of the notion that he had been installed by senatorial bosses, and Burden had studied the faces of Lodge and Brandegee and Smoot, and found in them a degree of sour corroboration. Lately, the cloakroom Republicans had taken to complaining how “the highbrows” of the Cabinet, Hughes and Hoover, were exercising far too much influence over the President. Now Borah, with help from his Democratic friend James Burden Day, was about to do some influencing of his own.
Harding motioned for the two men to sit on either side of him. Coffee was brought. The dog chewed a bone at Harding’s feet. “I figured this was the quietest place, on short notice.” Harding waited for the butler with the coffee to go. When the door shut behind him, Harding whispered, “Boys, I tell you this place is like something at the time of those Louises of France, or maybe the Borgias. Everybody’s listening to you all the time. Half the time we talk in code so what we say won’t end up in Hearst’s papers.” Harding turned to Burden. “Heard you had kind of a tough race.”
“Thanks to you, I nearly lost.” Burden’s majority had been very small indeed, while two of the state’s congressional seats that had never been anything but Democratic had gone Republican. Kitty had been indomitable, and Burden had not been himself, energy much lowered since the flu. Would he ever be well again? he wondered. “Jake Hamon also spent a lot of money in our state, which didn’t help.”
“Poor Jake.” Harding shook his head. “Well, if he had to get killed, I suppose it was more becoming that it was his mistress and not his wife that did the deed.”
Borah allowed five minutes for presidential small talk. In some mysterious way, at least mysterious to Burden, the lone wolf of the Senate had made himself its greatest power. In fact, when Lodge and his senatorial coven had tried to re-create the League of Nations without Wilson, Burden had overheard Borah warning Lodge that if he tried to support any kind of League, Borah would break him. Lodge had, most icily, said that it was singularly insolent for a young man like Borah to speak in such a fashion to his elder (and, by implication, better), to which Borah had said that there was worse to come if Lodge and his friends tried to betray the electorate. When Lodge had then threatened to resign as majority leader, Borah had thundered, “Resign? Never! We won’t let you. We’ll throw you out, as an example.” Clearly, all the drama these days was on the Republican side. The Democrats were demure; and dour in their electoral defeat.
“Mr. President,” Borah began; and Burden felt a chill—thus the great windy tribune addressed the presiding officer of the Senate. Was he going to speak for four hours? Suddenly, Harding was, once again, just a spear-carrier in the Senate, staring, hypnotized, at the greatest of chieftains. “We have had our disagreements in the past. I did not support you until last September when you assured me that you would never support our entry into any League of Nations.” Borah’s eyes were fixed on Harding, who blinked, and cupped his right cheek in his right hand and chewed on the stub of an unlit cigar.
Borah took silence for consent. “My fear of foreign entanglements is well-known. But I am hardly an ostrich. I know what will happen should the nations start up an arms-race in a world at peace. Should there be a competitive build-up of fleets, I am here to tell you that we will be at war with Japan within the next quarter-century, and, frankly, I would regard such a war as nothing less than a crime against humanity, started by us in our neglect.” Borah drank a glass of water.
Harding took advantage of this pause. He sat up straight. “Senator, it is perfectly clear to me and to Secretary Hughes that the troubles with Japan have already begun, specifically in the matter of who will control the island of Yap now that Germany is gone from the Pacific and, generally, in the matter of who will control our common ocean, the Pacific.”
Burden was startled by the usually vague President’s sudden mastery of the relevant detail. He looked at Borah out of the corner of his eye and saw that the wide mouth was now slightly ajar—with surprise? Usually when Borah was in the room only Borah spoke. “Now then,” the President put down the cigar stub, “it is not our wish around here to get the folks upset all over again over the Yellow Peril—like 1913 when we almost had a war with Japan. On the other hand, I take your point, Senator, about the necessity of coming to terms with them outside the League of Nations, which alarms you more than it does me, but then that’s the way we are, you and I. For me, the League is a perfectly nice idea which probably wouldn’t work even if we were to join …”
“Mr. President, should we join the League, our liberties would be surrendered …” The Lion of Idaho had begun to roar. But the President raised his hand, and smiled.
“I hadn’t quite finished, Senator. Certainly I know your eloquent views on the subject.” Harding looked at Burden as if for confirmation. Burden responded with a nod. The President continued. “I am going to prepare a disarmament campaign pretty much along the lines of your December-fourteenth resolution which authorized—or was it directed?—me,” Harding’s smile was mischievous, “to ask the British and the Japanese governments to join us in cutting back our naval programs by fifty percent or whatever. Mr. Hughes and I have been working on this ever since we got here, though neither of us has had much to say on the subject in public. I’ve discovered one thing about this job.” Harding stretched his arms; then he cradled the back of his neck in his hands. “Someone—in this case you—can come up with a good idea that the President likes, but that’s not always enough, because a lot of the time even though he—me—agrees with you on a policy, I have to say no, and sit back, looking sad and forlorn, until you force me to do the right thing.”
“In this case, you can count on my forcing you, Mr. President.” Borah was somewhat taken aback by Harding’s unexpected grasp of the essentials of power. Burden had often noted that for want of good timing, many an excellent policy had failed of enactment. “What’s nice here,” said the President, “is that disarmament is as popular with the pro-Leaguers like Bryan as it is with you anti-Leaguers. Only Mr. Hearst and Burden’s Naval Sub-Committee dislike it, which proves we
’re on the right track.”
Burden smiled. “I like it, even if the rest of the sub-committee wants more and more and bigger and better battleships.”
“All those contracts!” Harding shook his head in mock wonder. “All that paperwork! Just makes your head ache, don’t it? Now, gentlemen, I want you on both sides of the Senate to keep the pressure on me. I will look grave and concerned and keep on saying you must not force the hand of the executive, and I’ll wonder out loud how on earth you think you could ever bring yourselves to trust the Japanese and the British to live up to their promise to disarm when you don’t trust them enough to join them in a League.”
Burden heard Borah inhale sharply as this needle found its mark. But the President was in full control of the situation. “So let’s keep in close touch during the next few weeks.” Harding rose, as did the two senators. Laddie Boy raised his leg against a chair. Harding gave him a shove and said sadly, “I wish he wouldn’t do that.” Then he turned to Borah. “Let me wind up my fishing expedition with the Japanese. The British are already on board, so they say. We may also have to include the French and the Italians to make them feel good. Then when we’re ready, I’ll give you a signal to go and put the gun to my head with a Senate resolution, and then, gracefully, I’ll give way, and we’ll send out invitations for a conference here in Washington, probably some time in July. You see,” the President had led them to the door, “I want this country to be known as a defender of the peace, everywhere.”
“We’re as one on that.” Borah shook the President’s hand.
“So was Wilson,” Burden observed, “but he would’ve made a brilliant speech prematurely. Then he would’ve denounced those who disagreed with him and … well, I suppose he would’ve declared martial law, if he could.”
“I am a softer president.” Harding smiled. “As there’s no chance of my ever being known as a great or brilliant president, like Wilson, I can only hope to be one of the better-loved, if any politician can ever be the beneficiary of such an emotion.”
“Such a thing,” said Borah, plainly impressed, “is very possible.”
Harding patted each on the back and led them into the main hall. “Anyway, what I really have going for me is that since nobody has the slightest expectation of me, whatever I do that’s any good at all will produce astonishment.” Then Harding plunged into a crowd of tourists, shaking hands and visibly spreading euphoria.
As Burden and Borah waited for their car at the north portico, Burden said, “Offhand, I’d say that the Senate is not guiding the President, as previously advertised. Quite the contrary, in fact.”
Borah grunted. “It’s Hughes and Hoover that do the guiding.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“What difference does it make?” Borah got into the car first, though Burden was his senior. Burden got in after him. The car smelled of hyacinth, which the driver had picked somewhere—where?—the hyacinth in Rock Creek had come and gone. “As long as we’re going in the same direction, everything’s all right. It’s later, when we differ …” Borah’s jaw set. He was made for opposition. He was eloquent, honest, intelligent; and he bored Burden to death.
3
Like an imperious lizard, Queen Elizabeth darted this way and that between the cardboard trees, which, despite superb—dim!—lighting, looked exactly like cardboard trees with paper leaves. Queen Elizabeth was very, very old and Mary Queen of Scots was simply old. Caroline sank lower in her chair, and watched herself unpack, one by one, her not very large bag of tricks. How few they were when all was said and done, and all appeared now to be said, done.
In the flickering light from the projection booth, she could see that Charles Eyton had not slumped in his seat; he sat very straight, smoking a cigarette whose smoke made cloudlike patterns in the ray of light that carried within its impulses the images of Traxler Productions’ Mary Queen of Scots, starring Emma Traxler, a “troubled” production, as Miss Kingsley had called it in the Los Angeles Times, one whose budget had gone from one to close to two million dollars “with no young love interest for the flapper set,” in the words of the Kine Weekly. Since Emma was the mature love interest, Taylor had, much to her relief, cut a subplot involving two young lovers. Now she longed to see dewy lips and unlined necks on the screen, anything other than her admittedly attractive ruff and somewhat less attractive tired eyes. Bothwell was the right age for her, which meant that they were both the wrong age for the movie audience as opposed to the theater, where, viewed at a distance, they would have charmed and convinced.
Caroline shut her eyes during the close shot where she turns on Queen Elizabeth in the cardboard forest. Despite careful lighting, the luminous eyes, beloved by adolescent boys and sapphic women of all ages, shone through a delicate network of very small lines never before visible in her mirror or, presumably, to the most expensive make-up man in the business. Now, like the canals of Mars, they registered thirty times life size on the screen. Caroline was beginning to feel ill. She grasped William’s hand, and found it sweaty. He returned the squeeze briefly; then detached his hand and lit a cigarette. There were a number of coughs from the rest of the audience, professionals who would soon be trying to market the long-awaited Mary.
A battle scene came as a relief. Then back to Mary’s prison, and a great deal of marching up and down, and arms flung this way and that like a Dutch windmill in a gale. At last the ending: a jeering crowd of extras who looked as they always did in every other photo-play. It was said that movie addicts all over the country had memorized the faces of hundreds of extras and whenever a favorite appeared, he was cheered as he fought in the American or French Revolution or languidly gambled at the casino in Monte Carlo or pushed a cart in the slums of Old New York.
Finally: The great doors of the castle open and Mary appears alone, in black, clutching cross, Bible, rosary. She is regal in her bearing yet, somehow, vulnerable, as almost anyone would be whose head is about to be chopped off. Who did she remind Caroline of? Mary was at the foot of the steps to the scaffold when Caroline recalled—Miss Glover, the mathematics teacher at Mlle. Souvestre’s, a woman with a never-ending cold, teary eyes and a dripping nose.
Caroline shuddered as she watched Miss Glover, clutching a much-used handkerchief, slowly ascend the steps to where the hooded headsman, ax in hand, awaits her. Wisely, Caroline had decided to keep her ruff on until the very last minute. William had suggested that she keep it on even while her head was being chopped off as no one would know the difference and, besides, an ax that could go clear through a neck could certainly take care of a mere ruff, but Caroline felt that history required a degree of respect.
Cut-away shots to the extras covered the removal of the ruff. Where before they were jeering, now they are suffused with both awe and pity, particularly a burly Highlander, who sports on one hairy wrist an expensive Longine wristwatch. They would have to re-cut, thought Caroline. Tim would have seen that wristwatch in time. Yet for this sort of thing William Desmond Taylor was the better director. But then again what, she wondered, panic beginning, was this sort of thing?
Mary Queen of Scots looks around her—one last luminous gaze upon a world that she is now about to leave forever. Then, ignoring Knoblock’s interpolation of Anne Boleyn’s “Such a little neck” (“Who on earth will know?” he had asked, “who said it?”), Mary—no, Miss Glover again—clutches Bible and cross to her bosom. A title card assures the audience that she is en route to a better world where trigonometry is the study of triangles. Then Miss Glover—eternally in thrall to Trinity as the ultimate triangle—approaches the block; kneels; places head on block.
Pity and awe seize the extras just as it will the audience, depending on who is playing the Wurlitzer organ at New York’s Strand theater or, if they are lucky enough to be booked into the Capitol, an entire symphony orchestra guaranteed to drag powerful emotions from any audience during those last moments as Miss Glover loses her head and the camera moves from the ax-man’s knees to
his hooded head to the tower of the castle behind to the stormy sky above where the sun emerges from behind a cloud bank to make a thousand prisms of the camera lens as Mary Queen of Scots’ troubled soul is received by angels—gloria, gloria, gloria!
Caroline wanted to kill if not herself Emma Traxler, whose blind vanity had got her into this humiliating mess.
As the lights came on in the projection room, Charles Eyton rose and shook his head rapturously. “Never seen anything like it. Congratulations, both of you.”
“It needs a bit of fine-tuning,” said William smoothly. “We’ll preview at Pasadena and see … you know, how it holds.”
Charles nodded and daubed at his eyes. “Take it to Bakersfield, too.”
So it was as bad as Caroline suspected. Bakersfield meant a working-class, meat-and-potatoes audience who would have hated Mary even more had it been good. The Bakersfield audience was also known to talk to the screen, advising the characters on their next plot-moves. Eyton was gone and Caroline accepted the congratulations of her fellow dream-makers. No eyes made contact with hers. She would go back to Washington.
Caroline dropped William off at his house. Although she wanted to talk to Tim, who was shooting a film in Culver City, William asked her to come in, rather more urgently than usual. Fortunately, Eddie was not visible. “Shall I make tea?” he asked.
Caroline said no, she would make herself a drink, which she did, from a console crowded with crystal decanters and silver-framed photographs of great stars, reverently arranged like Roman household deities. As in every other Hollywood house, Mary Pickford was principal goddess. Presumably when she got old and resembled Miss Glover, her picture would be removed from a thousand consoles and the tops of ten thousand pianos, and Gloria Swanson—or someone—would take her place. “Who is this?” For the first time Caroline noticed a picture of a striking if not beautiful woman with a large hat and huge dark eyes.
