by Alice Arlen
—
YEARS LATER, as Alicia tried to reconstruct the evening, with details and even dates by then inevitably blurred or forgotten, one thing she remembered was that it was a memorable weekend when the great J-boats were racing on the Sound; which would mean mid-July 1938, the last prewar America’s Cup, between Mike Vanderbilt’s Ranger and the British challenger, Tommy Sopwith’s Endeavour II: the two beautiful, slender, 120-foot-long hulls, with their towering single masts, immense triangles of white sail, sliding back and forth on the blue-black waters, midway between Connecticut and Long Island. You could see the boats from Neysa’s house, but they were far away, indefinite in the summer haze, and it wasn’t something anyone was really watching. Alicia was at Neysa’s on her own that day, as was often the case; Joe was supposedly competing in a racquets tournament in the city, though since she knew the Racquet Club courts weren’t air-conditioned she assumed he was in a game somewhere, hoping for a big score. She remembered George Abbott being around, the director, one play on Broadway, another in rehearsals, who seemed to be a permanent houseguest at Neysa’s that summer. Also Heywood Broun and Howard Dietz, the songwriter, from down the road. The usual chorus of young women in linen dresses, bright smiles. And then the boats were no longer racing, the sunlight was going, gone, and you could begin to see yellow houselights blink on across the water. Somebody, Alicia recalled, probably Neysa’s husband, Jack, said there was a big crowd down at the Swopes’ and they should all drive over—Herbert Bayard Swope, another forgotten pharaoh buried beneath the sands of time, but then the larger-than-life editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World—friend of presidents, patron of writers, consort of tycoons; also gambler, racehorse owner, party giver, whose nonstop parties, with their hundreds of guests, and lunches merging into dinner into breakfasts, had once been the model for Jay Gatsby’s hospitality. By the time they all reached Swope’s mansion, scores of people were literally spilling over the sides of the enormous veranda, a band was playing somewhere, waiters busied about with trays of food, buckets of champagne. Swope himself was out on the front lawn, in white flannels, shirtsleeves, playing croquet by floodlight. And then, as Alicia watched at a distance, Joe Brooks, finished with his poker game or maybe backgammon tournament in the city, drove up in a car with three other men, all four of them rumpled, cheerful, variously soft and bashful with drink. She remembered looking at Joe standing on the lawn, tieless, in his New York suit, Herb Swope’s arms around him, or maybe vice versa, for the two men liked each other, both of them gamblers, one successful, the other not so much. And then, as she remembered it, out of nowhere there was the sudden crash of a huge summer storm, a cascade of water pelting down on everyone: Joe Brooks and Swope were running for the house, while she must have run back with Neysa, Jack, George Abbott, whomever, to the safety of their Packard. And then they were driving again, not far really, along some back roads close by the Sound, and then into a driveway, with what seemed to be a vast, imposing, castle-like edifice at the end of it—in fact, the facsimile of an entire thirteenth-century Normandy château. It was called Falaise, and was the property of Harry F. Guggenheim—one of “those” Guggenheims—who had apparently once told Neysa that she should come by sometime and check out his new bowling alley, and so, being Neysa, there of course they were. The rain had almost stopped but at first they stayed in the car, in the half light of the courtyard lamps; then one by one they got out, stretched their legs, walking about in the light summer drizzle, on the soft, crunchy seashell surface of the ground. What an extraordinary place, Alicia remembered thinking, with its towers and terraces, its high brick walls, its cloistered medieval elegance right at the water’s edge. And then the front lights went on, the great arched door swung open, and there, apparently, was Harry Guggenheim: tall, handsome, gentlemanly, with piercing eyes, a friendly, amused smile, older but not old. She couldn’t remember whether they actually went to the new bowling alley or not, how long they spent there, what anyone talked about. But she always remembered how Harry looked that night, and how he looked at her, and surely she at him.
· 31 ·
BY ALL ACCOUNTS the happiest times in the Brookses’ mostly disconnected marriage were those long days, usually in late August, which they spent together at his fishing camp, in the wilderness along the east fork of the Ausable River, about sixty miles north of Lake Placid, in the shadow of Mount Marcy; a stretch of the river where forbidding boulders, brush-covered banks, cold water, and plentiful crayfish provided three species of trout—brook, brown, and rainbow—with what many aficionados thought was the best natural habitat in the eastern United States. Joe Brooks’s camp had well-sited tents, employed the best camp cook in the Adirondacks, and Brooks himself, despite his size and enormous hands, was widely held in high regard for his impressive river skills. He famously used a two-ounce bamboo rod, specially made for him by Leonard & Co., so extraordinarily light that a clumsy cast could break it, and yet sufficiently precise that a superior fisherman could drop a fly just where he intended, at the edge of the most seemingly inaccessible pool, and then delicately float the fly along the surface until a rising fish took it, at which point he’d reel him in, slowly, patiently, sure of his touch—like a great saxophone player, one of his guests once said, holding an impossible note.
While Alicia hadn’t originally come to fishing with the natural hand-eye coordination commonly required for expert fly casting, and in the beginning often got her line hung up on shrubs or overhanging tree branches, or sometimes lost her footing on slippery rocks and took a ride downstream (with consequent fits and curses), all the same she characteristically refused to give up trying, with the result that year by year she improved, until she herself was now at an almost expert level, successfully wielding the special three-and-a-quarter-ounce rod Joe Brooks had doggedly taught her to use. As he more than once told her sister Josephine, his idea of perfect happiness was to watch his wife working the river on a late summer afternoon; it was, he used to say, as much as he wanted out of life, which was doubtless true.
Fishing on the Ausable in the Adirondacks.
Brooks and Alicia owned a single-engine Cessna together, at least that’s how they described it (a gift naturally from Joe Patterson), which they mostly used for flying in and out of fishing camp; also, toward the end of August, after a couple of weeks of living in tents, they’d sometimes stuff some proper resort clothes into a couple of valises, take off from the field outside the village of Ausable Forks where they parked the plane, and fly two hours south to the old-fashioned but thriving town of Saratoga Springs, New York, originally popular for its healing, medicinal waters, and now even more so for its August season of thoroughbred racing.
Despite its out-of-the-way, upstate location, Saratoga was an unexpectedly cosmopolitan place, where you could gamble legally on horse races, or illegally at the several casinos on the other side of the lake, where well-known big bands played, and Hollywood celebrities such as Bing Crosby and Clark Gable mingled with the Eastern racing elite. Alicia and Joe usually stayed at the United States Hotel, one of the older and better hotels, which had been around since the 1890s, when Commodore Vanderbilt’s New York Central had helped make the town an attractive destination. Even in the late 1930s, Saratoga seemed to belong to a bygone era, with American flags and patriotic bunting on display, horse-drawn carriages competing with automobiles, dry-goods stores and soda fountains and a long dusty avenue called Broadway. The rich men who owned thoroughbred stables elsewhere in the country, and sent their horses by rail to Saratoga, walked about in linen suits and straw hats; their ladies sat in private boxes at the track, shaded places where “colored” butlers served mint juleps and Sazeracs, and changed their dresses throughout the day depending on hour or mood. August at Saratoga with its muted, well-bred atmosphere of carnival, drew “the best people” from all over the country, from Newport, Bar Harbor, Philadelphia, and certainly many from Long Island’s North Shore: Phippses, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Bostwicks. Not
surprisingly, in that week of late August 1938 Harry Guggenheim was there too; he almost always went up there for the season, as Alicia almost surely knew he would.
A few more words about Mr. Guggenheim. At the time he was forty-eight years old and a man of many attributes. For one thing, in an era when there were fewer than one hundred millionaires in the nation, he was immensely rich: the grandson of Meyer Guggenheim, an immigrant whose silver mine in Leadville, Colorado, began the family’s mineral empire; the only son of Daniel Guggenheim, one of seven brothers who expanded the original silver business into copper mines and smelters across the American West and into South America. For another thing he was highly intelligent, both practically inquisitive as well as erudite. Privately tutored for years at home to protect him from anti-Semitism, he had enrolled at Yale, but soon after arriving at college he noted that he was refused permission even to try out for the freshman tennis squad despite his strong qualifications, and promptly left New Haven, along with his manservant, enrolling in Cambridge University across the Atlantic, where he distinguished himself in engineering studies and also won his tennis “blue.” Later he worked as an engineer and project manager at the family’s mines in Peru and Chile. In his late twenties he served as a distinguished United States ambassador to Cuba from 1929 to 1932. By the time he and Alicia made their initial connection, he had become a substantial power in the world of aviation, first as an early friend and patron of the still hallowed Charles Lindbergh (Lindbergh had written We, the famous account of his transatlantic flight, in a guest room at Falaise), and more recently as director of the important Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aerodynamics. In his spare time (so to speak) he had also developed a growing interest in thoroughbred racing, deploying part of his North Shore acreage for stables and raising horses, several of which were now up in Saratoga for the races, along with their owner, who gave every appearance of being a bachelor, and a rather debonair bachelor at that, but was in fact still married to his second wife, Carol Morton, a member of the Morton Salt family, by report a kindly, nature-loving alcoholic who increasingly kept to her own world, emotionally as well as geographically.
Of course Alicia Patterson Brooks was also still married, in some ways even more married than Harry Guggenheim, since her husband was right there with her in Saratoga, although for the most part not so much with her as around the lake at the casinos. Joe Brooks had never been much of a horse fancier except for the betting part, but Alicia loved horses, always had; even though she no longer rode as an avocation, she still knew her way around stables and trainers, was known to other horse people, and during those four or five days in August it appeared that she was fast becoming known to Harry Guggenheim, who asked her to view the races with him from his private box at the track, which she did on numerous afternoons. Then, too, she began getting up early, leaving her sleeping husband in their bed at the United States Hotel for a brisk walk to the racetrack, where she stood beside Harry Guggenheim while he watched his horses work out, timed their runs, conferred with his trainer. One morning after the workouts, she remembered, he asked her to meet him later in the day, at the afternoon auction, when he said he would be bidding on some of the yearlings and would value her opinion. Tipton’s Auction House was the oldest in the country, a big, dusty, barnlike structure out near the racecourse, with a small auditorium, a rectangular walking arena for the horses, and a pavilion for special guests. Alicia, who had been short of feeling special lately, seems to have felt herself a special guest of Harry Guggenheim’s and later, after the bidding was over, in the course of which he’d flattered her by taking her advice on several offers, they took a walk outside, down by the New York Central tracks, past the empty boxcars for the horses, past the siding where they parked the owners’ private railroad cars. She remembered, or claimed to remember, that Harry had on a dove-gray linen suit with a yellow tie; she thought she carried a straw hat in her hand because the wind was blowing; and when he took her by the arm to help her across one of the tracks, something she could easily do by herself, his hand just under the elbow, the lightest of touches but still something so definite, she knew there was going to be a lot more to it than that.
· 32 ·
IN CERTAIN OBVIOUS as well as less obvious ways, Alicia and Joe Brooks’s marriage had been on shaky ground, thin ice, since its inception. Choose your metaphor. Though perhaps not teetering on a high wire, since that implies a more intense connection between the two than ever seems to have existed. As we know, the relationship had started years before they married, in fact at Brooks’s fishing camp, when she was Joe Patterson’s outdoorsy daughter, come to visit, and he was her father’s good friend, much-esteemed wartime buddy, athlete hero, true outdoorsman, and so on, who could do no wrong as far as Poppa was concerned. When she let herself be talked or pushed (or however it was) into marrying Joe, the arrangement had seemed almost natural, logical, and if any of the three had ever paused to consider the incestuous shadows, or at least the odd dynamics, of the situation, there is no record of it. What’s perhaps more surprising than her attraction to, and affair with, Harry Guggenheim is that nothing like it seems to have occurred beforehand; not that Alicia necessarily remained totally faithful to Brooks in seven years of marriage, but that there’s no indication of her having entered into a serious romance with anyone, or left her husband for any length of time.
But with Guggenheim, matters were swiftly on a different footing. Two months after Saratoga, Alicia and Brooks were living apart, Alicia in their (her) New York apartment, Joe at the Williams Club. Six months later they were legally separated; a moment that evoked from Brooks another of his painfully boyish and doubtless anguished missives: “Dear One, King Booj is missing Baby Booj unbelievably. Always fly fast and safe….Remember darling, I am going to do everything in my power to make your future happier than it has ever been in the past, and I am sure we will laugh and play our life long so that you will never regret me.” And then, on June 15, as a mark of how fast she was flying, how decisively her life was changing, a cold legal note passed between Alicia and her father, signed by both, transferring back to “Mr. Joseph M. Patterson…all ownership of the aforementioned house and grounds at No. 11, Gardner Drive, Sands Point, N.Y.”
Alicia seems to have anticipated that there would be problems with her leaving Brooks, who for years had been one of those larger-than-life characters beloved by many, certainly all those who didn’t have to live with him, a sizable group that numbered many of her friends, her sister Josephine, and inevitably her father, who had brought them together, promoted the marriage, and then sustained it in manifold ways. When it came to Poppa, she had somehow assumed that, while he almost certainly wouldn’t like the turn of events, wouldn’t choose it, he would nonetheless support his daughter, take her side, at least wish her well on her new trajectory. Unfortunately, his initial response was a good deal more negative than she had expected, and his reaction didn’t improve with time.
What she hadn’t quite reckoned with was something she might be excused for not having taken into account; not that it hadn’t been part of the world she had grown up with, and not that Poppa hadn’t been part of that world; and yet Poppa had always been different, had always kept to his own course, had broken free so often from the limitations of his background. Granted, Joe Patterson had a number of sources for dismay, even anger, at this decision of his erstwhile favorite daughter’s to break up with Joe Brooks, his old pal, his World War I coreligionist, everyone’s friend, what was not to like about good old Joe Brooks? On some out-of-the-way, unacknowledged level of consciousness, her rejection of Brooks must have registered as a rejection of himself, which would have surely hurt. But it turned out that what really froze his soul in a manner of speaking was what she did next: her taking up with Mr. Harry F. Guggenheim of all people, scion of what was then the richest and most powerful Jewish family in the United States, indeed one of the most substantial five or six families in the country. It was as if his sometimes re
ckless, sometimes restless little daughter, the close one, the one who always needed him, and whom he could always count on, now in a chess game he didn’t know he was playing, had just checkmated his king, and with her own public and powerful Jewish king. It was a sorry moment in Patterson’s narrative but not the first or last; for Joe Patterson who long prided himself on his openness, his gift for getting on with anyone and everyone, a man who in a lengthy career in newspaper publishing, and lately as a New Deal supporter, surely had any number of Jewish friends. And yet there was no doubt that Harry Guggenheim’s Jewishness was, as people say, a problem for him; that, of course and all the rest of Harry Guggenheim’s situation: not just the money (though definitely the money) but the grandeur, the houses, the foundations, the family’s national presence. Sister Josephine, for once unhelpful in her sympathies, reported to Alicia on a mournful, bitter lunch with her father and Joe Brooks, during which Patterson had remarked “that he wouldn’t be too surprised” if Guggenheim hadn’t been using “some of those European mind-control techniques like hypnosis” on his daughter.
Given the tensions surrounding her breakup with Brooks (whom she continued to care about and even love, with all sorts of mixed-up daughterly and wifely emotions), it was on the whole a lucky coincidence of timing that Joe Patterson, just then, was himself experiencing more than his usual level of distractions, both in his public and private lives, giving him little time for more heavy-handed fatherly attentions. At the Daily News his editorials had been growing ever more strident in advocating his own particular brand of isolationism, urging the Roosevelt administration toward two quite different international policies: In the Pacific he advocated “a well-armed America,” promoting a buildup of defenses, preferably with a “ring of bases” extending from Hawaii to Asia; as to Europe, on the other hand, whose leaders had recently shown no stomach at Munich for confronting Hitler, he repeatedly advised that we should “let well enough alone”; that the British fleet was still “the most powerful military entity in the world” and could be trusted to take care of Britain and its empire; that we had “bailed out the Europeans once before and had little to show for it.” Both these judgments, pugnaciously expressed, ran counter to President Roosevelt’s own internationalist impulses, which had little interest in the Pacific, while at the same time sought to find ways to support European democracies in their struggle against the Fascist powers. His other distraction was much more personal: the need to legitimize his situation with Mary S. King.
