by Gore Vidal
It was Emma who pointed out the various stars on parade, of which easily the most enchanting was Joan Fontaine, all in violet, her enigmatic smile characteristically aslant.
“I was wrong about her. Wrong about Hitchcock, too. I thought they’d ruin Rebecca.”
“I loved it!” Emma the movie fan was far more agreeable than Emma chairman of more right-wing causes than Tim could begin to count. Then they were joined by Tim’s agent. Bert Allenberg was a tall slender man with a deep voice and though he looked like a vice president of the House of Morgan, he wore a too-well-cut suit of black mohair. Since for all his distinction he was still a professional agent, he kneaded Tim’s left shoulder blade to make sure that his client’s current success would pass to him as well. Bert was gracious to Emma, who affected shyness.
Then: “We’ve got a deal. Only verbal, so far. But you’re getting twice the budget of United and you’ll operate out of London or wherever you have to be.”
“Oh, that will be really thrilling!” Emma sounded like a Hal Wallis starlet.
“When do I start?”
“Now. You want Balderston?”
Tim nodded. “I’ll need him for London.”
“But isn’t he …?” Emma’s frown was a sudden Medusa-like tic, capable of turning even Bette Davis to stone.
“Yes,” said Tim quickly, “he is.”
“But British secret service …” Emma began.
“We need all the help we can get,” said the agent, unaware of the enemy at the table.
Tim deflected Bert. “I’ve promised L.B. an interview with Hitler on camera, and the Brits say they can set it up.” Fortunately, at that moment, a magnificent blond starlet from Warner Brothers made her slow, voluptuous way from the Siberia of the back dining room through the bar. The star-filled booths fell silent at so much splendor until Bette Davis declaimed, in a voice whose every neat syllable could have been heard, unamplified, from top to bottom of the Hollywood Bowl, “And there goes the good time that was had by all.”
A burst of unkind laughter. The starlet fled; inside the telephone booth next to the door through which she exited, there was the sound of frantic pounding. The enormously fat Austrian writer Franz Werfel was wedged next to the telephone, apparently not for the first time, since two calm waiters, working in almost balletic concert, skillfully turned him this way and that until he tumbled out.
“Always a good time at Romanoff’s,” Tim observed.
Bert Allenberg rose. “You’re at the Garden of Allah, Tim?
“Bungalow right next to Errol Flynn’s. You can’t miss the screams. The midnight splashing in the pool.”
Bert waved and moved farther up the row of stars, greeting each as if he was their host at a party, as indeed a master agent tended to be.
“Noisy?” Emma’s face was flushed.
“Flynn? Very.”
“I must meet him.” Emma was breathless.
Tim wondered if he was attracted to her only because she was Caroline’s child. First the mother; then the daughter. There was some primitive instinct at work in each which made them so sexually compatible while, at best, each basically mistrusted the other, as Caroline would have intended had she been the goddess in charge of this diversion.
“You would look marvelous with blue hair.” Laura Delano, the President’s middle-aged cousin, turned her elegant face full upon Caroline, who took an inadvertent step backward as if to better observe the sculpted blue hair of her hostess for the night.
“I don’t have the coloring to carry it off,” Caroline responded smoothly, as if every day of her life she had considered whether or not to dye her hair blue. Actually, the President’s spinster cousin having just missed sky-blue during her last encounter with the paint bottle had, somehow, shifted from azure-white to an aggressive dense purple that suggested eccentricity rather than the fanciful charm of international society’s most glamorous figure, the first of the blue-haired ladies, Mona Williams.
“Oh, but you do. We must try before you go. Franklin thinks he’s going to lose.” They were seated, the two of them, in the cavernous drawing room of the Delano mansion, just north of Rhinebeck, which, in turn, was north of Hyde Park on the Hudson, where, that night, in the so-called Big House of the Roosevelts, they would join the President and listen to the election returns.
“Harry thinks …”
“Pay no attention to Harry. He’s an optimist. That’s because he’s a social worker.” Laura’s non sequiturs had a kind of majesty.
“It’s true that Willkie …”
“Neck and neck in the Gallup Poll. Well, for Franklin’s sake, I want him to come home. Here. Where he belongs. In the valley. Home sweet home.”
“Home on the range?” Wherever the President appeared, bands played this dolorous song.
“McIntire. He’s the one. Dreadful song. Someone asked him—he’s also tone-deaf—what the President’s favorite song was and he said, ‘Home on the Range,’ which Franklin hates but can never say so for fear of losing the home-on-the-range vote.”
“Like General Sherman and ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ Every time the general appeared in public, some band would play it. Finally, one day, he burst into tears.”
“Serves him right. For burning down Georgia. That book with the Confederate-gray cover. You know, Gone With the Wind. There’s also a lot to be said for not showing off all the time in public. Of course, Franklin has to. Or so he says.”
With Caroline beside her, Laura drove her own car south along the River Road that had once been part of the famed Albany post road—now simply a winding lane through wooded countryside with, on their right, the estates of the so-called River Families—Chanlers, Aldriches, Delanos, Millses, Astors, Vanderbilts. Most of the houses were not visible from the road since each had been built on the high bluffs above the Hudson so that steamship passengers could marvel at the palaces of their masters, built in every style from Greek Revival to McKinley Gothic, the overall feudal effect only slightly marred by the presence, between river and estates, of the loud New York Central Railroad as it hugged the marshland at river’s edge.
“This war—and we shall soon be in it—will be the end of all of us.” Laura narrowly missed a turtle that had begun to cross the road at a prehistoric pace. “Such idiots, turtles. Terrapin. I can understand—to eat—at least in the South. We shall not survive, Caroline. You and I.” Laura’s finely chiseled face stared into Caroline’s, whose eyes, consequently, seldom left the twisting road that Laura had chosen to snub.
“Hitler will bomb us?” Caroline, inadvertently, put her hand on the steering wheel. Laura pushed the hand to one side. “I can drive this road in my sleep.” Narrowly a farmer’s truck swerved to one side to avoid collision. “He shouldn’t be driving and he knows it.” Gaily, she waved to the farmer. “He’s got cataracts. No, it will be the end of us because all the village boys are going to war and when they come back they won’t want to be the one thing that we cannot do without—servants.”
“Surely,” said Caroline, “there will always be maids?”
“No such luck. Franklin says they will all be working in factories. Later, they will marry the boys who come home and one by one we—the River People—will die off in our freezing houses, with no one to so much as turn down a counterpane.”
“It is a picture of horror that you paint.” Caroline had always wanted to play in an Oscar Wilde comedy; now Laura was improvising one with her. Contentedly, they itemized all that would be lost when triumphant soldier boys and their factory girls fled the great estates, and Vincent Astor was obliged to cut the grass of twenty acres of lawn while his wife washed dish after dish from dawn until dusk.
“Fortunately, I’m just me,” said Laura contentedly.
“How will you eat?”
“I love tinned sardines. You know, the boneless ones from Portugal? S. S. Pierce sells them. Oh, I won’t starve. The rest of the time I shall simply stay in bed.”
But of course, th
ought Caroline, Laura was, in her dotty way, absolutely right. The life that she had taken for granted in the United States—France, too—would not resume. Blum had foreseen much of the future and found it good; but then he favored egalité rather more than Caroline did. Even so, these were, after all, Modern Times and if Charlie Chaplin had got it right, soulless factories would be the future while machines, not men, farmed the land.
It was nearly dark when they arrived at Eleanor’s Val-Kill cottage and Laura jammed her car next to another, out of which leapt an angry state trooper. “Get that damn thing off …” Then he saw, in the last gold glimmer of daylight, the purple hair. “Miss Delano.”
“You are an angel!” Laura cooed. “You know how rough my landings are.”
The trooper opened her door while Caroline, having made herself invisible, got out the other side. Several dozen cars were parked on the driveway and on the uncut lawn; and a number of dinner guests were taking the evening air in front of the wooden cottage that was, Eleanor maintained, her only true home. Here she saw her lady friends; received her husband as a guest; and lived as private a life as she could while farther down the road, in the Big House, her mother-in-law presided in all things, including placement at the dinner table, where she always sat in the wife’s place, opposite her son Franklin, while Eleanor took whatever seat was available.
The swimming pool beside the cottage had always seemed to Caroline to be more of a pond than a proper pool. Certainly it had a marshy smell but, even so, on the terrible hot days of a Hudson Valley summer, it was a refuge for all, including that occasional visitor the President.
Caroline found a number of unfamiliar faces in the sitting room, which was just off the dining room, where Mrs. Nesbitt, or one of her kitchen acolytes, had arranged mounds of creamed chicken and rice. Although there was no wine to be seen, at the very center of a round maplewood table, the work of two of Eleanor’s lady friends, ardent cabinetmakers in the Early American style, stood a single bottle of whiskey, eyed longingly by a number of guests of whom not one dared do more than stare. The Roosevelt sons were all equipped with flasks, according to Harry Hopkins, who greeted Caroline by the fireplace, where a large green log smoked and hissed.
“How do you like Laura?” Hopkins was amused at the thought of two women so unlike in each other’s company.
“Almost an original, I’d say, and a demon on the road. What news?”
“Connecticut returns are coming in. We’re doing as well as expected.”
At the far end of the room Caroline saw the giantess Helen Gahagan talking to her giantess hostess. “Mrs. Douglas is very interested in politics, isn’t she?”
Hopkins nodded. “Obsessed, I’d say.” He frowned. “The President’s worried.”
“That he’ll lose?”
“I don’t see how he can. But something’s bothering him.”
“Time’s winged chariot?”
“Oh, we’re all used to that old buggy. Of course, it’s on its way for him. For me, too. No. He senses something wrong, something peculiar about this election. I spent most of the day with him, playing poker. He actually lost.”
“Unusual?”
“Well, not exactly usual. He does like to win.”
Caroline was aware that Hopkins wanted to say more but did not—dare?
Caroline asked if the President would be joining them at Val-Kill Cottage. “No. He and the dragon are dining alone in the Big House. Then, around nine, we’ll join them to hear the returns. It’s a regular ritual by now, like Christmas Eve.”
“Will there be another one in four years?”
“If we get through tonight, who knows?”
“Get through what?” Caroline could no longer rein in her curiosity.
“There’s talk of a putsch.” Hopkins spoke in such a low voice that it took Caroline a moment to absorb his words.
“Here? In Hyde Park?” she asked, aware of how stupid she must sound.
“No. Here in the United States. Willkie’s people are supposed to have made some sort of deal with the German government. They’ll let us have the Western Hemisphere …”
“Which you already have.”
“… if President Willkie will then force England to make peace with Germany so that Hitler can move against Russia.… For the good of mankind, naturally.”
“To destroy communism in its nest.” All through the summer Caroline had heard this line repeated over and over again by ardent members of East Coast country clubs. “But this is all …” For a moment she found herself thinking in French and could not think of the English for blague. She came up with the inadequate “bunk.”
“Maybe bunk. Maybe not. But the Boss is scared of something and it’s something more than the possibility of losing.”
The Boss, however, to Caroline’s eye, was his usual expansive self as he greeted Eleanor’s supper guests in the large drawing room of the Big House. In the adjacent dining room the mahogany table was strewn with pencils and pads. In the small “smoking room” off the dining room, wire-service ticker tapes had been installed, and Secret Service men tactfully kept the guests from straying into this command post, where Missy Le Hand presided.
“Caroline!” The President took her hand in both of his. He looked both tired and full of energy, as if an unexpected source of power had been switched on. “Democracy at its messiest. Dutchess County–style.”
“You seem to thrive, Mr. President, on mess.”
“But sometimes I wonder if I may not be overdoing it. Three terms could be a bit much, as Mr. Willkie likes to remind us.” Caroline noticed the slightest of frowns at the mention of his rival and potential—what? Putsch-maker?
Then the President was wheeled into the dining room, accompanied by Hopkins, who waved—farewell?—to Caroline as she sat beside the fire and made conversation with the President’s huge, in every sense, mother. Mrs. James, as she was always called, resembled a somewhat more masculinized version of her son.
Eleanor now moved swiftly between drawing room and dining room. She had changed into a flame-colored dress and Caroline thought of her as a potential pillar of fire, and more than a match for any Mitteleuropa dictator.
Except for Mrs. James in her chair beside the fire, no one in the room was still for long: groups formed; broke up; re-formed. Eleanor would join each group briefly; answering questions. Caroline, having exhausted her small talk and not yet willing to move to larger talk for the benefit of Mrs. James, soon relinquished her privileged place beside the old lady to Daisy Suckley, another of Franklin’s old maid cousins. Mrs. James seemed unaware that Caroline had been replaced, as she continued her own practiced series of observations on what it was like to be—her phrase—“a historic mother.”
Harry Hopkins emerged from the dining room as Missy Le Hand entered with a pile of messages. Hopkins drew Caroline off into a corner. As he tried to light a cigarette, his hands shook. Caroline lit it for him. “He’s losing,” she said.
Hopkins nodded. Through the dining-room door, Caroline could see the President mopping his face; sweat gleamed in the stark light from overhead: naked electrical light bulbs on frayed wire were a Roosevelt decorating motif. As Missy Le Hand left, Roosevelt turned to a Secret Service man and said in a voice so loud that Caroline could hear him, “Get out, Mike. Shut the door. I don’t want to see anybody in here.”
“Not even Mrs. Roos …”
“I said anybody, Mike.” The Secret Service man did as ordered, closing the doors behind him.
“Has that ever happened before?” Caroline helped the suddenly weak Hopkins into a chair. Fortunately, none of the other guests had heard the President as clearly as Caroline and Hopkins had.
“No. Never. He’s …” Hopkins shut his eyes; then summoned a small smile. “We’re getting returns from the Willkie states at the moment. It’ll be another hour before we hear from our states. New York. Illinois. Ohio. Pennsylvania …”
“But he knows that, too. So what’s really wrong?”
“Willkie’s running far ahead of Landon four years ago. He’s got enough going for him to cut into us badly in the big states. There’s whiskey behind that photograph of the King and Queen.” Caroline poured each a drink. Then she sat in the chair beside him; and they were very still for what seemed hours.
Finally, Eleanor approached the Secret Service man at the dining-room door; she was admitted. Caroline caught a glimpse of the President in his shirtsleeves; he was grinning now. “I think it has happened.”
Hopkins opened his eyes; and nodded at what he saw. “We’re in!”
The entire room seemed to know simultaneously. Helen Gahagan was now a self-appointed official spokesman. “Seventy-five percent of labor, Negroes, foreign-born, and all lower-income groupings are for Roosevelt.” Everyone cheered. Caroline admired the professional sound of “groupings” instead of the more amateurish “groups.”
The President remained at his station in the dining room but he was now smiling as he clasped his hands and raised them above his head in traditional victor’s style. The guests in the drawing room applauded and Mrs. James waddled majestically into her dining room to salute her historic son.
“Come upstairs.” Hopkins led Caroline to his bedroom, where they found Judge Sam Rosenman and Bob Sherwood, the President’s principal speechwriters; they were listening to the returns on the radio.
“I win my bet with the Boss.” Rosenman was beaming. “He didn’t think he’d get more than three hundred and forty electoral votes. Now he’s over four hundred and still going up.”
“Bless Boss Hague, Boss Murphy, Boss Flynn,” said Hopkins.
The announcer said that so far Wendell Willkie had not conceded the election but it was only a matter of time.
Then, from below, a band played “The Old Gray Mare,” not a tactful song, thought Caroline, as the night sky turned red from flares. Caroline hurried to the window. Hundreds of people were converging on the house, illuminated now by the powerful lights of the newsreel cameras.
“We don’t want to miss this!” Hopkins was suddenly full of energy.
