by Alice Arlen
While in London, Sir Max, or “the Beaver,” as he was also known, took Patterson and Alicia in his personal charge, showing them around the new Daily Express building, a striking, modernist edifice constructed entirely out of steel and black glass (consequently much derided by Londoners), afterward including both of them in a round of policy discussions about the problems posed by the fascist leaders, Mussolini and Hitler. On the night of July 14, he gave a glittering ball in honor of the visiting Americans at his extraordinary residence, Stornoway House, overlooking Green Park, with its fourteen bedrooms, six salons, and its own grand ballroom, where the much-in-demand Ray Noble orchestra played that evening. It was the height of the London season, and hundreds of old and new names attended, including wicked, glamorous Lady Diana Cooper, an old flame of Max’s (who once described him as “that strange attractive gnome”) and whom Alicia had met more than a few times when, as Diana Manners, she played the Madonna to sister Elinor’s Nun in The Miracle.
Croydon Aerodrome, July 1935: Josephine, Alicia, Joe Brooks waiting to take off in Lord Beaverbrook’s plane, with Sir Max and Joe Patterson, who were hoping to interview the Axis dictators.
Two days later the serious phase of the trip began, when the Patterson party was driven out to London’s Croydon Aerodrome, with its grassy runway and blowing wind socks, where Sir Max and six of his friends and associates were waiting to board a shiny new four-engine de Havilland, chartered by Beaverbrook to fly them all to Rome and possibly on to Berlin. The backstory on this at-the-time early example of airborne personal diplomacy might be said to have begun some months before, with Adolf Hitler’s dramatic and disquieting announcement of German rearmament, blatantly disregarding the terms of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, publicly defying the former Allies. This worrisome move (at least worrisome to those in Europe not blind to the German Führer’s ambitions) was then somewhat offset by the appearance of Hitler’s junior partner, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, at the Stresa conference, in April in northern Italy, where to many people’s surprise he indicated a measure of independence from Hitler by joining the English and French foreign ministers in repudiating any changes to the Versailles treaty. While in London, Patterson had paid numerous visits to the German Embassy, trying to secure an interview with Hitler, either in Berlin or at his summer retreat at Berchtesgarten. As Alicia noted later, “Father had Hitler’s number from the start, even when so many other poobahs were either impressed or on the fence. But he had this old-fashioned thing of wanting to ‘look the other fellow in the eye,’ and take his measure.” In the case of Mussolini, or “Musso,” as Patterson and Beaverbrook referred to him, there was real hope, in Alicia’s words, “that he and Max could sit down with him, see if his peaceful impulses were real, could be counted on to any extent, and do what they could to encourage him to go his separate path.” In London the Italian ambassador, Dino Grandi, had met with both publishers and assured them of Mussolini’s willingness to see them and of his interest in an interview.
When the travelers finally landed in Rome, they were met out on the airfield by a cortege of officials from the British and American Embassies, commanding an array of massive automobiles, in which they were driven in stately procession into the city, where they soon expected to be received by Mussolini. But Mussolini now appeared to be having second thoughts, occasioned not surprisingly, as history would later reveal, by Hitler’s fury at his junior partner’s Stresa speech. For days, for the better part of one week, two of the West’s more famously impatient citizens were forced to cool their heels in the Italian capital. Patterson spent his time shuttling between the American and German Embassies, still trying to arrange an interview with the German leader, still being told that the Führer was unavailable. Sometimes he took Alicia with him, “as someone to growl at since he couldn’t growl at the embassy secretaries”; but mostly she was left on her own, to be happily escorted around the Colosseum, the Borghese Gardens, and so on by one or another of Beaverbrook’s bright young men, particularly Sir Michael Wardell, a dashing former cavalry officer with a patch over a missing eye. Finally, on the day before they were all due to pull out, Mussolini had second, or possibly third, thoughts and declared himself ready to meet with the publishers. Alicia went in a second car, with some of Beaverbrook’s staff, to the Generalissimo’s white palazzo, waited downstairs “in a gloomy, marble chamber noisy with the clicking boots of Fascist officers,” expecting that the interview wouldn’t last long.
In fact the meeting lasted nearly three hours, most of the afternoon. Alicia noted her father’s reaction: “He described Mussolini as predictably short but surprisingly massive, hard, with an odd, orange color to his skin which might have been makeup. And his voice was high and very voluble. For a long while he told stories, jokes, reminisced about his own days as a newspaperman. Whenever Max or I tried to ask him about Stresa, he’d pause, look as if he were about to say something, then change the subject. Once he said people misquoted him, or didn’t understand. ‘Which is it?’ I asked. And then he’d tell another story. By the end, it was disappointing. I don’t think he’s a gangster like his Nazi friend, frankly I don’t know what he is.” After Rome, with Hitler still unavailable, the two publishers flew on to Belgrade and Warsaw, where as Alicia noted, “endless dinners were given by important people,” and where the talk was “more about Communist agitation than Fascism.” She also remembered thinking, on the boat back to America, that her smart friends in New York were so insistently pacifist, so against war, and wondering how all that was going to work.
· 29 ·
AND THEN THERE WAS THE TIME she accompanied her father to the Soviet Union. This would have been in late August 1937.
Do we remember the last time Joe Patterson visited Russia, in December 1905, when it was still called Russia; when Leningrad was St. Petersburg, Czar Nicholas II’s capital; when young Patterson’s obdurate aunt Kate was the wife of U.S. ambassador Robert McCormick, still half sober and only semiloony; and when the world watched with mixed feelings as the first wave of revolution, personified by Moscow University students, took to the streets against the czar’s police? Thirty-two years later, more than middle-aged, still tall but stooped, Patterson, accompanied by his traveling partner, Alicia Patterson Brooks, was trying once again to pass through Leningrad, this time the Leningrad airport, on his way to the Soviet capital at Moscow; and trying too to keep his composure as casually truculent Soviet airport officials first detained father and daughter for no apparent reason, then unceremoniously emptied their suitcases onto the counters, literally turning them upside down, rummaging through their belongings in a supposed search for contraband. Alicia later recalled that she was more concerned for her father’s dignity than for her possessions, though in the end both emerged more or less intact, and they were allowed to make their way into the city of Leningrad and later board the sleeper train to Moscow.
Patterson and Alicia were traveling to the Soviet Union at a time when American-Russian relations, only lately emerging from a strained period of official nonexistence after President Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1932, were beginning their back-and-forth swings between friendly and frosty, between wartime partners and mistrustful allies, that eventually ended in the Cold War. Right then the Soviets seemed to have settled into what would later devolve into a familiar alternation of superficial cooperation with stony and often bewildering intransigence. For instance, two years before, with much show of reciprocal amity, the United States had finally opened an embassy in Moscow, taking over the once-palatial Spaso House, and dispatching well-regarded William C. Bullitt as ambassador. But no sooner was he installed than Bullitt had stormily requested reassignment, detailing a list of Soviet insults, some pointlessly petty, others less so, such as the Soviets’ reneging on an earlier promise not to actively support the Communist Party in the United States. Bullitt, as it happened, was an old friend of Patterson’s, a member of the same secret society at Yale, an
old-style, speak-your-truth, no-nonsense businessman; Patterson had originally planned to visit Moscow while Bullitt was ambassador. But Bullitt had left, was now U.S. ambassador in Paris; and the new American Ambassador to Moscow was Joseph E. Davies, a smooth, well-meaning Chicago lawyer. Davies was the husband of the immensely rich Marjorie Merriweather Post and, more important, a Roosevelt loyalist who, unlike Bullitt, was doing his best to tell the president only what he wanted to hear about his new partners in the Soviet Union: one example was his notorious message to a complaisant Roosevelt to the effect that “Premier Stalin…in my considered opinion, is a simple, decent man who is only trying to get his house in order, despite many provocations.”
Coincidentally, during the ten days in August 1937 when Alicia and her father were in Moscow, roughly a half mile from their hotel, in the high-ceilinged, grimy Hall of Justice, the second of Stalin’s infamous “show trials” was winding down; with the pathetic parade of Stalin’s former comrades in arms, men such as Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, hollowed out by degradation and torture, forced to admit absurdities of guilt, treasonous behavior, spying for Germany. Neither Patterson nor Alicia sought admittance to the trials, though they were aware of their existence. They were also aware of the divergence of views on what was taking place between the official Soviet line, echoed by such influential voices as the New York Times’s Walter Duranty and Ambassador Davies, to the effect that the guilty verdicts and death sentences were clearly on the level, rough justice of a sort, and obviously justified, as proved by the prisoners’ admissions of espionage; and the opposing perspective, the grim truths privately provided by junior officials at the embassy, such as a young friend Alicia made at the time, the twenty-seven-year-old George F. Kennan, later architect of the State Department’s “containment policy” in the 1950s.
The Pattersons were staying at the Metropol, once a hotel in czarist days, later a Soviet office building, now more or less a hotel again. But whenever they tried to walk out the door, even to stroll around the block, there was always a so-called “guide,” sometimes two of them, in their black suits, blocking their way, telling them where they could and mostly couldn’t go. Partly to escape these clumsy minders, Patterson and Alicia would often stop in at the American Embassy, which Ambassador Davies was in the process of refurbishing with new electrical fixtures, including freezers for the chocolate ice cream his wife was partial to, and a phone system designed to be free of Soviet surveillance, which it never was. But the embassy itself was its own kind of dream zone, thanks to Ambassador Davies’s bland confidence as to Premier Stalin’s peasantlike benevolence and good intentions. After one meeting with fellow Chicagoan Davies, as Patterson told his daughter, the ambassador, speaking of Stalin, declared that he could never “distrust a fellow with such a twinkle in his eye.”
Fortunately George Kennan could get free sometimes to provide a reality check; as when one afternoon, spotting her sitting in the embassy reading room, he took her out for a drive in his car, which with embassy license plates could travel unimpeded by the Intourist “guides.” So for an hour they left the antiseptic main boulevards, traveled down side streets, some just next door to the big hotels and government buildings, where she could see the ordinary citizens of socialism’s “great experiment” in their tattered clothing, rags on their feet instead of shoes, lined up outside shops for food and clothing that all too evidently had little food or clothing within, and sometimes, as she noted, “bent over, like peasants in a field, picking through piles of garbage for a next meal.” Another unmediated glimpse of the realities of the Soviet state occurred while she and her father were actually driving in an official Intourist car to an exhibit of workers’ art. The guide appeared to make a sudden detour, though to what was obviously a predetermined destination: a small square, where on first sight could be seen a listless gathering, in fact of presentably dressed men and women, leaning against a building, holding placards at their sides. However, as soon as the Intourist car came into view, the crowd leaped into action, running into the street, yelling, chanting, brandishing their placards at the Pattersons. “These are Soviet citizens,” the guide explained, “who wish to praise the death of all the guilty traitors and enemies of the state.” Alicia remembered her father clamping his big hand on the shoulder of their secret policeman–guide, saying, “Just get us the hell out of here.”
—
IT’S WORTH ASKING, at least rhetorically, what Alicia took away from these two extraordinary trips, one to a Europe teetering between peace and war, the other to Stalin’s Soviet Union, with its grim stage-set version of a “workers’ paradise,” real-world big-game expeditions, one might call them, to the true dark continents of the 1930s. Not for a moment, then or later, did she ever consider herself as anything but a bystander, a tagalong, as important personages, her father among them, shook hands with Fascists and Communists, exchanged “positions” via interpreters, breathed one another’s cigarette smoke; nor did she expect, as a more-or-less young person of her time, that any of the busy, bustling men would turn to her for her opinion of larger matters, or even suppose she had one. Alicia, however, no matter how academically unschooled, was a quick study, educating herself where and how she could. In a future yet invisible, she would become a prominent liberal Democrat, an internationalist; she would strongly, and sometimes bravely, oppose the witch-hunt defamation of a generation of leftists, “pinkos,” Communist sympathizers, and so on. But at the same time, even when some of the people she most admired—as if they couldn’t help themselves—kept insisting over the years that the Soviet “experiment” was essentially benign, willfully misunderstood, and so on, she never forgot what she saw, and what she learned, on the side streets of Moscow.
· 30 ·
BY THE LATE THIRTIES scarcely anyone was reading Scott Fitzgerald anymore, although the glamorous, moneyed landscape he’d so lyrically and lovingly celebrated, specifically Long Island’s North Shore, with its great houses and green lawns sloping down toward the Sound, seemed (unlike their fabulist) to have been barely dented by the Depression. True, one or two of the old mansions were still shuttered, while many of the remainder made do with reduced staff, for example five indoors and about the same outside, on the grounds. There was less froth but better roads; and new houses had been going up, though smaller, more sensible, as their occupants claimed, three or four bedrooms on five-acre lots being sold off by the tax-beset mansion owners. Two such newcomers to North Shore society were Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Brooks, whose strikingly (or perhaps jarringly) modernist, three-bedroom house stood close to the edge of the water on Sands Point. The house was a glass-and-brick rectangle designed by Raymond Hood, who happened to be Joseph Patterson’s favorite architect, designer of his Ossining house as well as the new Daily News building, and whose architectural plans had been presented to Alicia and her husband along with Patterson’s gift of the house. It was not always an easy house to live in, too hot in summer, too chilly in the cold months, besides being somewhat stern in its modernist configurations; but it was surely a handsome present, and well intentioned, even if part of the intentions were to prop up Alicia and Joe’s marriage, which with the passing of time seemed ever more in need of propping up.
It wasn’t as if Alicia herself had struck oil, landed a starring role on stage or screen, or even in her own life. She did little pieces for the Daily News, which in part gave her a sense of doing something, earning pocket money, in part reminded her that doing little pieces wasn’t what she had in mind. She spent more and more time in Neysa McMein’s studio, collaborating with the gifted and very professional Neysa on what seemed an endless sequence of cartoon strips and words-and-picture projects that never quite seemed to get off the ground. Even so, she could sense that she was on an escalator going up, however slowly, and sometimes fitfully, and even if she didn’t yet know what her destination would be; and by the same intuition she could tell that dear old Joe was on an escalator, not merely stalled but going in an oppos
ite direction. And more and more often, dear old Joe wasn’t so dear anymore, was no longer that big bear of a man, with maybe too many drinks but still a pal, a good sport; more and more nights Joe didn’t come home till late, and then as a big bear of a man who couldn’t stand up, couldn’t undress himself and worse, didn’t even seem to have the energy for tears.
The Brookses’ modernist Raymond Hood house at Sands Point, more of a loan than a gift from Poppa.
For Alicia the Sands Point house, no matter its unforgiving rectangles, was both a refuge from the trials of weekday life and a jumping-off point into the emerging vitality of the period: of course parties and drinking, the ever-present cocktails of the 1930s, but such a far cry from Onwentsia and Lake Forest, all these new, smart, talky people, stage and screen people, magazine and newspaper people, men and now and then a woman who worked in something other than the country club professions of stocks, bonds, trusts, and estates. Tall, long legged, graceful Neysa McMein was such a new woman—an example, a possibility—which was implicitly one of the reasons Alicia sought her friendship, and one might say had even followed her out to Sands Point. Neysa and her husband, Jack, rented a large white-brick house down the road from the Brookses, a roomy, welcoming place that, come summer weekends, overflowed with attractive people, for Neysa was famous for her mixing skills, Bernard Baruch and George Gershwin, Jock Whitney and Harpo Marx.
