by Marc Peyser
By that time, Alice had just turned twenty-one and had begun zeroing in on a groom of her own. Her taste veered toward men with big personalities and bigger bank accounts. After all, she repeatedly overspent her annual $2,000 inheritance from her mother (about $50,000 in 2015 dollars); at eighteen, she wrote in her diary, “I swear to literally angle for an enormously rich man…I cannot live without money.”87 She’d had a few serious crushes, including Robert “Bobby” Goelet (a New York land baron), J. Van Ness Philip (lawyer), Charles de Chambrun (French diplomat), and Arthur Iselin (from a banking family so wealthy there’s an entire town in New Jersey named for it). But her most ardent admiration was saved for Nick Longworth, the same man for whom she and Maggie Cassini ditched James Hazen Hyde’s mock Versailles ball.
The congressman met Alice’s monetary requirements. The Longworths had been one of the richest families in Ohio, having made their fortune buying up land in and around Cincinnati and later turning some of it into Catawba grape vineyards. (A Longfellow poem called “Catawba Wine” was actually dedicated to Nick’s great-grandfather.)88 Nick was a first-rate violinist, a cracking raconteur, and, at thirty-five, a good fourteen years older than Alice. “I didn’t particularly like boys. They were all over the place when I came out but there was I, one of those dear little virgins giving the older ones a good time,” Alice said. “I always liked older men. A father complex coming out, presumably.”89 Nick fed her daddy issues in other ways: like Theodore, he was a short, mustached Harvard man (he even belonged to Roosevelt’s beloved Porcellian Club) and a die-hard Republican. His political patron, the Ohioan William Howard Taft, later became Theodore Roosevelt’s handpicked successor.
But Nick differed from Theodore in one telling way. He was a wild man: a gambler, a lothario, and a boozer, with morals as loose as TR’s were ossified. It was one thing when a scandal sheet such as Town Topics identified Nick as “the gay young representative, who is as familiar with the role of Romeo in everyday life as he is with politics on the floor of the House.”90 It was another when Alice’s own stepmother noticed his waywardness. “Your friend from Ohio,” Edith told Alice, “drinks too much.”91 Of course, that was a big part of his appeal. He was a bad boy, but with credentials so impeccable her father couldn’t possibly object. In fact, it was her father who had introduced them.
Alice was hardly the only Washington woman in Representative Romeo’s sights. For a time he wooed her friend Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, though the fact that Cissy was engaged to another man posed a slight problem. (Nick and Cissy still managed to carry on an affair years later after they were both married to other people.)92 Before Alice had shown the slightest interest in him, Nick began pursuing her friend Maggie Cassini, who was introduced to him by the hostess at a lavish Massachusetts Avenue party. “Here is someone who wants to meet you,” the hostess said as she presented Nick to Maggie. “Be careful; he’s dangerous.” Then she turned to Nick: “And you be careful because she is very dangerous.”93
Together they became a toxic triangle. Alice, Maggie, and Nick romped around Washington just as you’d expect from Capitol Hill royalty, holding court at embassy parties and yacht outings, gossiping at House lunches, private teas, and dinners at the Alibi, Nick’s bachelors’ club where the members sometimes cooked for their guests. (Nick’s specialty was Welsh rarebit and other haute chafing-dish cuisine.) They even hit the occasional taffy pull. “Everyone was sure Nick was going to marry either Alice or me—but which one was the question that so agitated them,” Cassini said. “The reporters were in a spin trying to keep up with the latest development.”94
To Maggie, this was all good, dirty fun. Not to Alice. Despite their friendship, she had always been wary of Maggie’s reputation as a temptress. Alice had already lost Charles de Chambrun to Maggie the year before, only to have Maggie dump him after he fell for her.95 (To complicate matters in this six-degrees-of-separation world, Nick’s sister Clara was already married to de Chambrun’s brother Adelbert.) But Nick was different. Alice was in love with him. Dozens and dozens of her diary entries, including the one written on the day of Eleanor’s wedding, end with the words “Nick oh dear Nick.” “I am sure she has him. N.B. Revenge on her,” Alice wrote after Maggie skipped out on a horseback-riding date with her and lunched instead at Congressional Country Club alone with Nick. “Old nasty Maggie. I’ll get even yet. See if I don’t.”96 It was almost enough to turn her Alice Blue eyes a monstrous shade of green.
She had good reason to be jealous, for Nick was very much in love with Maggie. He proposed to her more than once, the last time at a sleighing party on a frosty night in Washington. At one point, en route near Lafayette Square, he stopped the carriage to fix the horse’s harness, then took the opportunity to propose to her again. Her reply: “ ‘All right,’ I said, suddenly gathering up the reins. ‘Here’s my answer!’ I flicked the horse with the whip, the sleigh bounded forward and Nick was left standing in the snow. How he got home I never found out.”97 Maggie promptly informed Alice, while they were perched together on the White House roof, carefully avoiding her father’s no-smoking rule.98 “It became more and more fun,” Maggie said, “to tease my friends by trying to take their beaux away from them.”99 She didn’t love Nick or Alice. She loved toying with them.
Alice and Nick’s relationship ran hot and cold that winter and into the first half of 1905. It was saved by the Russians—or, rather, by President Roosevelt’s determination to end the Russo-Japanese War before it threatened America’s “open door” trade interests in Asia. Theodore Roosevelt had no love for the Russians; he considered them to be “colossal in their mendacity and trickery”100 and the czar a “preposterous little creature.”101 And while he favored the Japanese and respected their superior military, he worried that if the war left them with too much unchecked power, they might start to eye the United States’ newest Pacific outpost: the Philippines. So the president began to formulate a working cease-fire treaty: Japan would get to keep and colonize Korea, while Russia would cede what it had taken of Manchuria back to China but keep territory it needed to run the Trans-Siberian Railway. The problem was how to sell it. Both sides wanted to stop fighting—by the middle of 1905 the Japanese were winning, but they were also broke—yet neither wanted to lose face by seeming to capitulate. So the most grandstanding, media loving of presidents had to negotiate largely in secret, holding a series of meetings in Washington and at Sagamore Hill with diplomats from each country to hammer out all the details.
There was one element that required top secret treatment. In order to extract a promise from Japan to stay away from the Philippines, the president had to promise in turn that the rest of Asia would be free for Japanese expansion. There were two problems with this quid pro quo. First, while he could guide American foreign policy as president, Roosevelt couldn’t effectively control it unilaterally. He had the constitutional power to negotiate treaties with foreign governments, but the Senate would still have to consent. In other words, while the deal between Russia and Japan could be hammered out privately, a broader regional solution involving the United States and committed to writing would open the door to rejection by other American politicians. In order to tap-dance around this problem, the president needed to make the strongest handshake agreement possible—by making a personal connection with the Japanese emperor himself.
Of course the president couldn’t do the deed; that would blow his cover. So he decided to dispatch Secretary of War William Howard Taft on a trip to Asia. Taft had been America’s first governor-general of the Philippines, so sending him to check on the colony’s progress seemed credible enough. And because he was going to be in the Pacific region, Taft might as well drop in on the neighbors: Hawaii, China—and Japan. Amid all the fanfare of this Grand Asian Tour, Taft could sneak away for a one-on-one meeting with the emperor without raising much suspicion. Unfortunately, at 320 pounds Taft would require a whale of a distraction to escape the media unnoticed. Fortunately, the most distr
acting person in the world in 1905 was Alice Roosevelt.
Alice had already proven herself useful on international junkets. In 1902, as a consolation prize for reneging on his promise to send her to King Edward’s coronation, her father posted her to Cuba for a month, where his buddy Leonard Wood, one of the Rough Riders, was the American-appointed military governor. The next year, she went to Puerto Rico on a three-week goodwill tour: “Welcome to Miss Alice Roosevelt” said the sign that greeted her in San Juan—written in fireworks. Whatever agita she caused her father at home, Alice made a point of behaving herself overseas. She never wanted to embarrass her father; she merely wanted his attention, and when he dispatched her as his ambassador, she was more than happy to serve him. “I had been very much pleased with all I had heard of how you acted in Porto Rico,” he wrote her. “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel that you liked them and you took an interest in them.”102
Alice’s dive into Asian diplomacy carried a much higher degree of difficulty, however, not least because she was exponentially more famous in 1905 than she had been in Puerto Rico two years earlier. Her free-spirited exploits made headlines from the minute she boarded her private railcar on July 1, 1905, en route from Washington’s Union Station to San Francisco, where the steamship Manchuria awaited her and the rest of Taft’s forty-person entourage. In Nevada, she fired a revolver off the rear of the train at some telephone poles to celebrate July 4. In San Francisco, she ditched her chaperones (a senator’s wife, her nurse, two friends from home, and Taft) and journeyed to the fringes of seedy Chinatown. And somewhere between Honolulu and Tokyo, she jumped, fully clothed, into the small swimming pool set up for her amusement on the deck of the Manchuria. The press’s quippy headline for her pending Asian adventure: “Alice in Wonderland.”
It was meant, mostly, as a compliment. Sure, there was the occasional sarcastic comment about Princess Alice and a serving or two of sour grapes.*6 But the truth is that Alice acquitted herself well on her four-month trip. She dined at the Japanese imperial palace and toured the royal gardens with the emperor himself, one of the few Westerners to ever see the grounds.103 In the Philippines she was feted at Malacañang Palace and, wearing a traditional Filipina dress, shook hands with more than twenty-four hundred people at a party in her honor. “Even possessing eight trunks and a maid, with the necessity of a fresh frock for every occasion, with the knowledge of being the cynosure of all eyes every moment of the day and night most women would find the situation difficult, yet this young woman is as self-possessed as a princess and uses her tiny hand glass and powder puff with an unconcern which is the marvel of all observers,” the Manila Times wrote.104
Most daunting of all was her stop in Beijing, where the Chinese were far less enamored of Americans, whom they viewed as pro-Japanese. Alice stayed at the summer palace of the dreaded dowager empress Cixi, who was said to have had her own son assassinated to preserve her hold on power and would soon do the same with her nephew the emperor Guangxu. Alice’s lunch with the dowager empress was mediated by an interpreter, Dr. Wu Ting-fang, who had served two stints as minister to the United States. Dr. Wu initially stood between the two women as he translated, but after some sharp (and untranslated) words from the dowager empress, “the poor man turned quite gray, and got down on all fours, his forehead touching the ground,” Alice said, and he continued to translate while prostrating himself.105 The dowager had wanted to make it clear, Alice later realized, “that a man whom we accepted as an equal was no more than a lackey she could put her foot on.”106 Alice was fascinated—and well rewarded by the apparently charmed empress. She received gifts throughout her trip, but the dowager’s were the most lavish, even if Alice found fault with a few of them: “Gold bracelets (set with rather inferior rubies), rings (lost those), jade and pearl earrings (still have those), some of those extraordinary long nail sheaths which they used to wear (I later made them into a brooch) and of course bolts and bolts of brocade.”107 It wasn’t long before the newspapers amended their snappy description of her trip with an even snappier one: “Alice in Plunderland.”
But the world wasn’t just watching Alice. Not long after President Roosevelt asked her to join the Taft trip, one of the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed on to the mission—Nicholas Longworth. The purported reason for his accompanying Taft was Nick’s long-standing interest in Hawaii and the Philippines, but no one believed that. When Alice had visited Nick’s family in Cincinnati the previous April, it made front-page news. The prospect of the two of them sailing the Pacific on a “floating palace” could only portend one thing, at least to the readers of the Herald: “Tropical Romance Anticipated.”108
Alice and Nick did little to camouflage their deepening relationship; after all, part of her assignment was to be conspicuous, to deflect attention from Taft’s cloak-and-dagger diplomacy. On Waikiki Beach, she and Nick and a few others frolicked in the waves for so long their floating palace sailed without them, and they had to be ferried out to catch the Manchuria.109 Though their shipboard table included Taft and about a dozen other congressmen and their wives, the couple often acted as if they were the only people aboard the ship. “She and Nick indulge in conversations on subjects that are ordinarily tabooed between men and women much older than they are and indeed are usually confined to husband and wife,” Taft wrote to his wife.110
It wasn’t always the love boat. Alice had witnessed Nick’s wandering eye before, and she still wasn’t sure she could trust him. “Oh my heart, my heart, I can’t bear it. I don’t know what is the matter with me. Nick…looked at me…as if he didn’t like me, and said he wouldn’t play with me tomorrow morning and I feel as if I might die. He will go off and do something with some horrible woman, and it will kill me,” she wrote in her diary in July.111 They would eventually patch things up, as they did repeatedly during the years of their bipolar relationship. A few days later at dinner, she found herself standing next to Lloyd Griscom, an American foreign minister posted to Japan. “Do you see that old, bald-headed man scratching his ear over there?” Alice asked. “Do you mean Nick Longworth?” Griscom replied. “Yes,” said Alice. “Can you imagine any young girl marrying a fellow like that?” she asked. “Why, Alice,” Griscom replied. “You couldn’t find anybody nicer.”112
Alice must have known that would be a minority view. When she returned home from Asia in mid-October, she broke the news with unusual care. While Nick was dispatched to the White House study to formally ask the president for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Alice pinned down Edith—in the bathroom. She had contrived to break the news while her stepmother was brushing her teeth “so that she should have a moment to think before she said anything.”113 The news couldn’t have been that much of a surprise. The papers had been buzzing about an engagement since the couple returned to American soil, some even speculating on the exact moment when Nick had popped the question. “Rumor says,” reported one paper, “that the fateful question was put as they were entering the door of the Empress Dowager’s palace in Peking, and that the affirmative came at the same spot as they emerged!”114
The only person who might have been left out of the matrimonial loop would have been Eleanor. While Alice had been working her magic throughout Asia, she and Franklin had been on a four-month honeymoon in Europe. Though regular letters from Sara kept them abreast of family news, the happy couple seemed blissfully ignorant of Alice’s exploits, lost in their own fog of sightseeing, shopping, and connecting with relatives and friends, including lunch with the American ambassador in London, Theodore’s old friend Whitelaw Reid. The Roosevelt connection didn’t always suit them. When they checked into the legendary Brown’s Hotel, they found themselves escorted to the Royal Suite, a $1,000-a-night palace within a palace that the hotel thought to be the only fitting place for the president’s family. They moved out only a few days later. While they could certainly afford the hotel bill, Franklin and Eleanor—unlike Alice—weren’t inte
rested in traveling like royalty. “I am getting Eleanor a long sable cloak and a silver fox coat for myself,” Franklin wrote to his mother, one of a series of jokes poking fun at his mother’s old-money disdain for extravagance. “Don’t believe all this letter please,” wrote Eleanor as a sort of postscript. “I may be extravagant but—!!!”115 (In the end, the joke was on FDR. When Sara went on a trip to Europe two years later, she discovered that Franklin had still not paid for some of his honeymoon purchases and fired off an angry letter to him in New York. “I am not accustomed to this way of doing business,” she barked.)116
Eleanor was one of the few to receive word of Alice’s nuptials directly from the bride-to-be. “Dearest Eleanor,” she wrote on December 5, 1905, “I want to tell you of my engagement to Nick Longworth. I am trying not to announce it until the 17th so don’t say anything about it until then. I hope you are surprised but I am much afraid you are not! Love to Franklin. It was too nice seeing you even for that brief moment the other day. A best love for yourself from Alice.”117 Alice didn’t make it to her deadline; the papers printed the official announcement on December 14. It came complete with details on the wedding and the honeymoon, such as the line in the New York Times that read, “Miss Roosevelt has not yet decided on her bridesmaids, who probably will be chosen from her cousins in New York.”118 That, like so much of the news about Alice, would prove to be wrong.
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*1 Tammany Hall was founded in New York as a political club in 1789, and developed quickly into a machine that delivered votes (especially of immigrant communities) in exchange for patronage and other favors. It reached its apex in the decades between the Civil War and World War II, dominating New York City and State politics, and tangling frequently with the Roosevelts.
