by Gore Vidal
“I shall pay you diamonds. To borrow them. That’s all. You can still, one day …”
“If I have the time, of course.”
“Yes.” Caroline nodded, grandly. “If you have the time, of course. Which you will. So good a nephew must flourish.”
“I’m off.”
“So soon? Before Cissy’s terrapin?”
“Millicent Smith Carhart is receiving next door. I said I’d come.”
“She’s still alive!” Millicent was the ancient faded daughter of a nineteenth-century president whose name no one could recall except specialists in the rich field of White House occupants. Millicent herself held a bluestocking court, very high-minded and the exact reverse of that of her only rival in Washington, the notorious Alice Longworth, daughter of the ever-notorious president, Theodore Roosevelt. Alice’s running battles with her cousins Franklin and Eleanor made the small city—as opposed to ever-expanding court—a joy for the well-placed bystander and something of a minefield for ambitious courtiers.
Caroline invited Peter to come visit her at Wardman Park. “This is a sincere invitation as opposed to all the others that I scatter about as I make my getaways.”
Caroline joined Harry Hopkins on a bench beneath a portrait of their hostess looking slender and decadent and wearing not a gown but shimmering bolts of material. “She looks as if she’s about to play Salome.”
“That’s a threat.” Harry was tired and pale and, as always, she had to remind herself he was only half alive, a half that was inhabited entirely by the President’s will. She wondered if there was anything at all left of the original Harry Hopkins. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Cissy really is the enemy now.”
“She’s for the third term.”
“This week. But she’s a Chicago isolationist. The worst.”
“She’s also very proud to be the Countess Gizycka of Poland, lost to Hitler—Poland is lost, that is. Cissy is forever at large.”
A tall man of middle age and middle height and middling appearance approached and greeted Hopkins politely. He was a Mr. William Stephenson from Canada, and Harry seemed to know him well.
Mr. Stephenson was the head of the British Passport Control Office in Rockefeller Center. “A humble job,” he confessed humbly.
“But fun.” Harry grinned. “He gets to stamp all those passports personally.”
Caroline was always amazed how, in a world where secrets were all-important, practically nothing was a secret from those few who were interested. Stephenson was thought to be in charge of all the British secret services in the United States and, personally, in charge of Mitzi Sims, who had been chosen to be the seductive Delilah who would, presently, shear Samson Vandenberg’s isolationist locks. In a sense, the whole thing was a perfectly open game. Attractive ladies would service elderly senators and learn their secrets while no doubt realizing, in the process, that few senators had any secrets worth knowing. But they did have votes in the Senate. If Vandenberg and Taft and Dewey would abandon even a degree of isolationism those martyred ladies would undergo beatification by a grateful England. Of course, in the end, it was unlikely that anyone’s views would be changed by a seductress no matter how alluring, but there is always information to be gathered at the pillow’s corner and, if matters should ever get entirely out of hand, blackmail was a game of some allure.
Stephenson looked about. “Is Philip here? Philip Lothian?”
“No. And neither am I.” Harry got to his feet unaided. “Philip’s doing a good job. The President likes him.”
Caroline also liked the British ambassador, an airy aristocrat who had once been an appeaser of Hitler but was now very much Churchill’s man on the spot, currently trying to get ships and planes out of the surprisingly crafty airy aristocrat in the White House. Roosevelt was driving surprisingly hard bargains with the so-called mother country, which was, as he had once mischievously pointed out, only a step-motherly country to him, as he was a Dutchman whose ancestors had been displaced by the English when they conquered the entire American seaboard and changed the name of the provincial capital of New Amsterdam to New York. Caroline had, more than once, detected in Roosevelt a certain nonchalant animus toward England and its empire and despite his recent allegedly candid correspondence with Churchill, he still liked to tell how, in the Great War, the First Lord of the Admiralty had snubbed him because, as he was only an assistant secretary of the American navy, he was of less than Cabinet rank and so worth neither time nor attention.
“It simply goes to show,” the President had pronounced with much solemnity, “you just never know who’s going to be what one day, so I make it a point always to be the same with everyone, which is, of course, a perfectly grand thing to do.”
“Well, dear,” said Eleanor, “you certainly never stop no matter whom you’re with.”
“That is because I am truly democratic.”
This conversation had taken place at the end of May, shortly after the good bad news of the successful evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk—over three hundred thousand men were safely transported across the English Channel. The President, Hopkins, and Caroline were gathered in the upstairs study to celebrate. Eleanor had been late in joining them. “There has always been something odd about my blood. But the doctor says there’s nothing really wrong.”
As the President wheeled himself past her, he gave her a friendly slap on the bottom. “But what did he have to say about that big fat ass of yours?”
Without a pause, Eleanor had said, “I’m afraid, dear, you were never mentioned.”
Even the President had laughed, with every appearance of heartiness; and Caroline had glimpsed another aspect to the Roosevelt relationship. It was the shy Eleanor who held the knife and so was the one to be feared.
Cissy tried to stop Caroline and Harry at the door. But Caroline was firm. “Harry has had a long busy day.” She sounded, as she intended, like a wife.
“But busy doing what?” Cissy’s malice was unremitting. “Spending and spending, electing and electing?” She quoted a famous Hopkins line.
“Yes, Cissy.” Harry sounded tired. “We need ships and planes to keep you safe in Dupont Circle.”
“You do bring some life to this dull town.” Cissy kissed Caroline almost tenderly.
“You are kind. By the way, peach and burgundy red do not clash.”
“Peach and …?” Then Cissy got the point. “How I invade my own privacy! Well, you must come up and see for yourself.” Cissy wickedly indicated the curving staircase.
“I’ve already seen them together, in a way. Those were the colors of Madame du Deffand’s salon.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know her. But if you say so …”
In the car that was to take Harry back to the White House before dropping Caroline off at the Wardman Park Hotel, Harry said, “I was serious.” He took her hand in his cold one. “I’m also getting a flat in New York, at the Essex House. A home for when I’m not here.”
“Even without that enticement, I accepted you, didn’t I?”
“You were making a joke.”
“Yes. But what better way to begin a marriage?” Caroline could not find the right note to strike. She liked him. She admired him. She was flattered to be at the heart of the court of what would soon be no longer “the Nation’s Capital” but the whole world’s. Unfortunately he was dying and she was not, or, as the old song put it, one was taking the high road and one was taking the low and though the destination for each in the end was the same, their different roads at different times would keep them eternally apart.
They spoke no more until the car was waved through the northwest gate of the White House.
“We could,” said Harry Hopkins as he kissed her cheek, breath like ammonia, “lose this war yet.”
“Henry Adams says not.”
“You speak to him in the grave?”
“Always. Germany is far too small, he used to say, too insignificant to wield the c
lub.”
“So was England.”
“The United States wasn’t really here in those days, with all our … magnitude. Today we are what matters, and the whole thing is ours if we want it.”
“You sound like the President. Except he doesn’t say ‘if.’ Good night.” Harry entered the rectangle of light that was the opened front door; then the door shut the light back inside where it belonged, and she was driven off through the summer dark that smelled of lemony magnolia blossoms from White House trees.
2
Tim sat on the window ledge of his bedroom in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel and looked down sixteen stories to the crowded Philadelphia street below. He held the telephone receiver a half foot from his right ear, reducing in volume the rasping voice of his current employer, Louis B. Mayer, the lord of the earth’s greatest (“more stars than in heaven”) film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, California, where, although it was eight in the morning, Mr. Mayer was at his desk, zestfully interfering in the work of the studio’s employees. It was Mayer who had decided to delay Tim’s picture until just before the elections on the grounds “that we got a real horse race now. Is this Wellkie of yours going to come out of nowhere like that Mr. Deeds and go to Washington like Henry Fonda—why don’t you ever use Robert Taylor?—and clean up the mess or will Claude Rains stop everything with that crooked dam he wants to build?”
“Yes, L.B.” Tim dreaded Mayer’s tendency to outline every plot—even act out key scenes—in order to keep reminding himself what the movie under discussion was about. At any given moment he must keep an eye on a hundred productions in various states of disarray, often because of his conflicting requests and generous advice. He had been skeptical of Tim’s documentary. For one thing, he disliked documentaries in general; for another, he disliked political ones in particular, ever since he had succeeded in destroying the candidacy of the novelist Upton Sinclair for governor of California. Eager to save what he believed was capitalism itself, Mayer had churned out innumerable films proving that Sinclair’s quixotic desire to end poverty in California was being directed by Moscow. Sinclair was duly defeated when he might have been elected while Mayer ended up deeply despised by the very people he had saved from the Red Menace. Since then he had contented himself with making musical comedies and, of course, the Andy Hardy series that had managed to put an end to Tim’s Hometown realism. In L. B. Mayer–land one could never be too false. Yet Tim had kept on working. One day, if only by accident, a door might open. Also, the movie business was so constituted that no one ever said never to anyone because, sooner or later, with so small a deck of cards, the same cards kept coming up, and Tim, who had once had, with Caroline, his own studio, was resigned to being, for now, an employee of L. B. Mayer, since one never knew what cards one might next be dealt from the small deck.
“The numbers I just got aren’t all that good for this ten-to-one Wellkie.” Mayer’s racetrack parlance was at least genuine. He had a passion for horses, and more than once the head office of Loews Incorporated in New York City, where the money for the studio came from, had told him he must choose between racetrack and sound studio. Thus far, he had managed to juggle both.
“The betting in Philadelphia is that Willkie’s got it on the fifth ballot next Thursday.” Tim had no idea what the betting was but he knew that he was speaking L.B.’s language.
“Win or place, I think you got a picture.” The shift to “you” from “we” was not a good sign. When things went well it was “my picture,” when there was still optimism it was “our picture,” but “your picture” …
Tim talked fast. “What we’ve got now which we didn’t have before is a real horse race. Momentum’s building all over the country. There are one thousand Willkie clubs. In every state. Oren Root’s organizing them …”
“Oren what?”
“Root. His uncle or something was secretary of state. Dewey’s still ahead in some of the polls but he’s starting to slide …”
“He’s the real dark horse and not Wellkie. He’s only thirty-something. That’s good casting. Look at Jim Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Congress, or whatever it’s called.” The one likable thing about L.B. was that he shared Tim’s dislike of Frank Capra’s fantasies about political life. But where Tim disliked their falsity, L.B. found them insufficiently sentimental; worse, they were made by what he regarded as a near-poverty-row studio, Columbia.
“Dewey’s no Jimmy Stewart. For one thing, he’s only three feet tall, with snaggle teeth.”
“Cap them,” ordered L.B. as if Dewey were under contract. “I’ve promised New York an October first opening. You’ll be ready.”
L.B. was off the line. Like so many of the old-guard studio heads, he did not in the least mind making a good film as long as he wasn’t told about it until the box-office verdict was not only favorable but in hand.
Tim’s crew was already at the Thirtieth Street station, where Willkie’s train would soon be arriving from New York. Since their St. Paul meeting, Tim had observed the candidate in a number of towns, watched as the crowds got larger and larger, studied the astonishing amount of press that the candidate of the Cowles brothers, of Henry Luce, of the New York Herald Tribune, was acquiring as if by divine right.
Some dozen journalists were already lined up on the underground siding. Tim had placed his crew closest to the gate and so would be able to get the busiest shot of the candidate as he made his way through the crowd, talking, talking, talking. He was like a tightly wound-up machine that simply could not run down, while his self-love was so guileless that Tim found it more contagious than repellent.
Unfamiliar cameras with the NBC logo were setting up just beyond Tim’s crew.
“It’s television,” said his cameraman. “You know, like that closed-circuit stuff they had at the World’s Fair.”
“Who gets to see it?” The previous winter Tim had been intrigued when what was called “a TV demonstration” had been made for a number of technicians at Metro.
“They say some fifty thousand people in the East will be able to watch the convention at home.”
“I didn’t know there were that many sets in the whole country.”
Several banker types came through the gate. Tim recognized Joe Pew, the elegant head of Sun Oil not to mention the Republican boss of Pennsylvania.
“I’m for Taft,” he had said when Tim interviewed him. “Willkie’s a New Dealer. We’ve already got one communist in the White House. Who needs another?”
Thus far, Tim had not been impressed by the masters of the political machinery of the republic. They thought and spoke in slogans. He had been in despair when he made his first rough cut of the footage already shot. Could one have a documentary on so grand a subject and not hear one intelligent voice? Then he realized that all these studied as well as spontaneous banalities could be arranged into an aural mosaic. The same phrase repeated in different settings by different people soon began to take on an ominous cadence, like what he imagined a Greek chorus to have sounded like: “He’ll pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire” in a dozen different accents across the country sounded as stately and as minatory as “multitudinous laughter of the waves of ocean.”
Then he began to intercut footage of the bombing of London: Troy aflame. He would soon have—or so he’d been promised—the previous week’s film of the French surrendering to the Germans in the same railroad car at Compiègne in which the Germans had surrendered in 1918. Hitler now occupied all of France except for a puppet government centered on Vichy in the south.
The film’s delay, thanks to Willkie’s having joined the cast, had allowed history to take the leading role, or at least history in the guise of the mysterious demon-king out of Central Europe.
Although not yet an interventionist, Tim did wonder just how far Hitler planned to go, assuming that he had any plan at all, which Tim rather doubted. It would appear that world conquest and movie directing were not unlike in the sense that the best effects w
ere often unplanned. On camera, Hitler had actually looked stunned when he realized, in Paris, that he had so quickly, even magically, conquered France. In a matter of weeks he would occupy the British Isles. Canada was now preparing to take in the royal family while Roosevelt was prepared to take over the British fleet, which alone stood between the United States and a German conquest, or so British propaganda maintained relentlessly.
“You’re down here for Willkie?” Joe Pew attempted an amiable smile; and settled for a baring of his teeth. He was like a caricature of a capitalist as rendered by the old Group Theater; the sight of his portly figure made Tim nostalgic for the certitudes of the militant thirties: of us and them forever in dubious battle.
“He’s the story. Right now, anyway.”
Pew was thoughtful. “I hate,” he said, “the way he looks.”
“I thought that that was the main thing he has going for him. Man from Indiana. Simple Hoosier. Like …”
“Like Mr. Deeds. Or was it Mr. Smith? The problem is that for a Wall Street lawyer, he is …” Pew lowered his voice so that his companions could not hear his shrewd analysis of the darkest horse in the history of American politics, “He is ill-groomed. That hair!”
“Folksy.”
“Unkempt. Mr. Farrell, there are only two ways that you can tell a gentleman from the way he dresses. His felt and his leather. Felt and leather,” he repeated and the rosy piglet face shone in the rising sun’s heat.
“Felt and leather?”
“Forget the suit, the shirt. They seldom are a giveaway now that everything’s off the rack for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to look alike. I can bear—I can just bear—his wrinkled suits, but it is the fine felt of the hat, the imported oxblood leather of the shoes, that mark the gentleman. He fails on both counts. He looks more like an auctioneer at a county fair than a gentleman, much less a president. Even a communist like FDR never ever cheats on his felt and leather. Properly bred to it, you see.”
