By late summer, when the heat drove away most of society and nothing much was happening in the capital, Dahl began spending his free time at Marsh’s vast eight-hundred-acre Virginia estate, Longlea, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The eighteenth-century English-style manor house, modeled on a mansion with a similar name Marsh had spotted on a visit to Scotland, was Charles’s gift to his young mistress, Alice Glass. He had bought the land in 1932 and spent four years and a small fortune building the rambling stone mansion, with its many bedrooms and broad, hundred-foot-long flagstone terrace, which ran the length of the house and was bordered by a low stone parapet, beyond which the land dropped off steeply to reveal a scenic bend in the Hazel River. Here, in the heart of Virginia hunt country, sixty miles outside Washington, Marsh set up his bride-to-be in great style, giving her free rein over the design and decoration of their palatial new home. She hired the New York decorator Benno de Terey, a handsome Hungarian known for his exquisite taste, and filled the interior rooms with sumptuous furnishings. The magnificent drawing room boasted an eighteenth-century Aubusson carpet, an enormous crystal chandelier, a Monet landscape, and at the far end of the room, a gilded Chinese Chippendale mirror hung over the mantelpiece. A grand piano stood in the bay window facing the terrace, framed by rich brown and gold damask curtains. The room was painted the palest blue, and every piece of furniture was upholstered in pure white. It was so ornate and forbidding that Marsh preferred to retreat to the mahogany-paneled library, with its large, inviting fireplace, bright Persian rug depicting a hunting scene, and Chinese opium table piled high with the day’s papers.
Dahl thought it by far the finest house he had seen in America. He would always remember the long winding drive that led up to the house, allowing a first fleeting glimpse of the blue slate roof and great chimneys that rose above the rolling hills. The approach was long and winding and cut through the woods and across green meadows that seemed to stretch for miles and were empty save for a herd of Black Angus cows. Longlea was a working farm. A half mile down the hill from the main house was the manager’s cottage, stables for Alice’s horses, a barn for the milk cows, and a poultry yard stocked with chickens, turkeys, ducks, guineas, and some ferocious hissing geese. There was a vegetable garden, a cutting garden, and a strawberry patch. All this was overseen by Marsh’s very correct Bavarian butler, Rudolf Kolinger, a former cavalry officer who had served the kaiser and who dictated menus to the chef, stocked the wine cellar, ran the staff of twenty black servants, mixed the drinks, and waited on table in the tradition of great country houses on the Continent.
Longlea had everything required to entertain on a grand scale, which Charles and Alice did constantly, hosting lavish weekend parties for all their new Washington friends and old Texas chums. Marsh believed in patronage, and beyond wanting to consolidate his power and influence in government, he built a house that would attract artists and musicians and writers. He sought to surround himself with a lively, sophisticated court, and his frequent guests included Vice President Wallace and his advisers; Welly Hopkins and Harold Young, a hearty back-slapping Texas politico; Lyndon Johnson, and Lady Bird; Beanie Baldwin, head of the liberal Political Action Committee and his aide, Palmer Weber; the wealthy Brown brothers of the Brown and Root construction company; the musicians Erich Leinsdorf and Zadel Skolovsky; the Randolph Scotts; as well as assorted cabinet officials, academics, writers, and journalists.
Charles also believed in pleasure and urged his friends to indulge their sybaritic natures. Guests would spend leisurely days relaxing by the pool, sunning, swimming, or playing tennis. There were all the pastimes of landed gentry, including fishing, shooting, and riding. Alice often went for morning rides and occasionally organized a hunt—known as the Hazelmere Hunt after the river—leading a small party of friends in a fast gallop across the soft green hills. She was a superb horsewoman and, Texas country girl that she was, an excellent shot. She had a skeet shoot installed on the high bluff overlooking the river and picked the spinning clay disks out of the sky with deadly precision. In warm weather, the outdoor terrace, with its breathtaking view of the mountains, became the center of activity. It was an idyllic spot, framed by flowering trees, mimosa, and a rose garden, and in the evenings their perfumed scent hung heavily in the air. Alice had ordered thousands of daffodils to be planted from the stone balustrade down to the cliff’s edge, so that in spring it was a blazing carpet of yellow. Breakfast and lunch were served outside, as well as cocktails, which were on offer morning, noon, and night. A bottle of champagne was always open. At Longlea, dinners were a very formal affair and were served in the elegant dining room with its long mahogany table, laden with gleaming crystal and silver, and rows of ribbon-backed Hepplewhite chairs. Alice loved to dress up and dazzled in the latest evening gowns, while Marsh, with his sculpted profile and gleaming pate, looked almost regal in his Fortuny smoking jackets. “Alice was a beautiful and charming hostess, very out-going and friendly, and interested in everything that was going on in Washington and the war,” recalled Creekmore Fath, who looked forward to the glamorous weekends. “It was an amazing time, and an amazing house, and Charles made it all very entertaining.”
To Erich Leinsdorf, “People like Charles and Alice [were] the best in any country under any circumstances.” The Marshes had first befriended the young concert pianist at the Salzburg Music Festival during one of their many sojourns to Europe during the early years of their affair. He had played at their private villa in St. Gilgen on the Wolfgangesee, and afterward Alice, who was very much taken with the gifted twenty-five-year-old, had awarded him pride of place next to her at dinner and later invited him to come visit them in Virginia. Leinsdorf, who by his own account was lucky “to conduct his way out” of Nazi-swamped Austria by getting himself invited to lead the 1937 season of New York Metropolitan Opera, remembered Longlea as something out of a dream. “There was a constant stream of guests,” he wrote in his memoir. “The accents were new, the lavish and easy life with martinis served at eleven in the morning was new, my room with its elegant antique furnishings was new…. I just sat goggle-eyed.”
Longlea was a showplace, designed to display Marsh’s most exquisite acquisition, and Alice, like the house, did not disappoint. Almost six foot in her bare feet, she was slim, graceful, and startlingly beautiful, with delicate features, wide-set blue eyes, and strawberry-blond hair that cascaded past her shoulders. When she descended Longlea’s dark, oak-paneled staircase, a hush would fall over the hall as all the assembled guests turned to stare. The noted New York society photographer Arnold Genthe, who was hired to take her portrait and was known for taking the famous picture of Greta Garbo that first piqued Hollywood’s interest, maintained that Alice was the most stunning woman he had ever seen. He was so besotted—by the queen and her palace—that he asked her to scatter his ashes on the grounds when he died.
If there was one thing Alice knew, it was how to make a lasting impression. The first time Charles Marsh saw her, she was stark naked, a pale, shimmering goddess rising unexpectedly from the mists of his Austin swimming pool. Marsh was then in his midforties and still made his home in the Texas capital, where he was a prince of the city and one of the most powerful men in the state with his string of fifty newspapers and a fortune that included oil wells and large tracts of real estate. He lived in the proverbial big house on the hill, an immense Tudor mansion in the exclusive district of Enfield, which had a commanding view of town and boasted one of the first private swimming pools in the area. With Leona, his wife of twenty years, and their three children away for an extended stay at their summer home on Cape Cod, he had been feeling bored and lonely and on a whim had decided to throw a party and open his home to Austin’s elite. At two A.M., after the last of his many guests had said good night, Marsh had wandered back outside to enjoy a cigar in the early morning cool when, as he later recounted the episode to Ingersoll, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a bold young girl emerging from
the water, “her long blond hair flowing among her fresh young breasts.”
Alice was not yet twenty. Intelligent and ambitious, she had fled the small Texas town of Marlin, where her father was the bank president, for the excitement of the capital city. She was working as a secretary in the state legislature and already had a long line of suitors when she entered Marsh’s life in the summer of 1931. The morning after the pool escapade, a smitten Marsh reportedly rolled over in bed and announced to Alice, “You are not for Austin, Texas, little girl.” Always one for rearranging people’s lives and underwriting their futures, he offered to send her to New York, where she could attend college and complete her education. Within weeks, Alice was installed at the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan, and Marsh, who had left his wife and Austin with little more than his slippers, was a frequent visitor. By the fourth year of their affair, he had bought her an apartment on Central Park South and was enjoying a new life in New York when she announced she was pregnant.
Marsh was determined to marry Alice, but it was easier said than done. Leona took a dim view of divorce and announced her determination to fight it tooth and nail. She engaged an ex-governor of Texas as her lawyer to persuade Charles to change his mind. Failing that, she warned she would file suit against him for violation of the Mann Act: Alice was most definitely a minor when Marsh first set her up in New York and had been transported across state lines with “immoral purposes” in mind. When Marsh met with Leona’s team of lawyers, he told Ingersoll, he called their bluff, telling them that when they had him in court, he was prepared to testify before a jury of his peers that the reason he was seeking a divorce was that he could not “get a hard on” in bed with his wife. “The choice is hers,” Marsh claimed he told her attorneys. “Does she want me in public court, so testifying—or do you gentlemen care to advise her to stop with this whole silly business and keep our private lives to ourselves?” Leona agreed to settle, and Marsh got his divorce. During the extraordinarily nasty and protracted proceedings, however, the court tied up all his assets for years, and by the time he got out from under, he had signed away all his oil fields to his greedy partner, Sid Richardson, and a generous share of his fortune to provide for Leona and their children.
This still left Marsh with the difficult dilemma of how to arrange a shotgun marriage to the respectable daughter of a highly respectable country banker, a man of good standing who was known to many of his friends. This was Texas, after all, and the family honor was at stake. The elaborate escapade that Marsh planned to finesse this problem, Ingersoll recalled, showed the publisher at his most “ingenious and mischievous:
To have the baby Alice was sent on holiday to London. From there she wrote at once to her family that she had fallen in love with a wonderful Englishman, Major Manners. She had married him on the spur, because he was an officer in a regiment which was suddenly posted to India. She was to join him after he was settled. But he was hardly gone when Alice’s family heard from their surprising daughter the happy news that she would be presenting him with a baby. She would stay in London, watched over by his country family, until the child came. Alas and alack, her doctors told her she was not up to a voyage home. But Major Manners got himself one leave and gallantly gave it up to journey all the way from the Himalayas to South Texas to present himself, in person, to his American bride’s family and friends.
Alice’s baby was born in England and duly christened Diana Manners. Shortly thereafter Alice wrote to her parents, informing them that her husband had been killed in a border battle, during “a skirmish with bandits.” Four months later the widow Manners returned to America with her fatherless infant. As for the British character actor who played the part of the hapless major, Marsh himself hired and rehearsed him after spotting his mug in an advertisement for Arrow dress shirts in The Saturday Evening Post. The eye-catching, full-page ad featured the handsome young man modeling a new collared shirt called “Manners.”
At Longlea, Charles’ attempt to establish a new life with Alice was fraught with problems, and the Virginia estate quickly became her principal residence—family members always referred to it as “Alice’s place”—while he seemed more like one of the guests. Alice had designed separate bedroom suites for herself and Charles and began to keep more and more to her own quarters. It did not help matters between them that when she gave birth to a son, Michael, two years after Diana, Charles knew the father was de Terrey, the charming decorator who had become her constant companion. Although he publicly acknowledged the boy as his own, he privately complained about her infidelity to close friends like Ingersoll and Dahl. (The baby had been conceived while Marsh was away on a long trip to California.) Alice, who was at best an indifferent mother, entrusted her children’s care to the ever-efficient Rudolf and his wife, Margaret, who over time became devoted surrogate parents.
Alice held court at Longlea much the same way Marsh did in Washington, gathering her own salon and inviting the sort of gay, lively crowd she preferred. She loved to dance, knew all the steps, and liked partners like Lyndon Johnson, who were tall and good on their feet. Alice had a taste for champagne, which she freely indulged. A great deal of alcohol was consumed at Longlea, a disproportionate amount by its owners. Drinks accompanied every meal, beginning with breakfast, and punctuated every activity, from an afternoon ride to a dip in the pool, setting a hardworking pace for guests. Charles kept up his end, despite having been diagnosed with diabetes, which he controlled with medication, but the result was that he sometimes crashed early. Alice’s parties tended to go well into the night and could get pretty wild. Long after Charles had retired to his bed, she would still be playing Gershwin tunes on the phonograph and looking for trouble. “She took on the privileges of a great beauty, and was very self-serving and demanding,” said Antoinette. “She was a real courtesan. She knew what she was doing.”
Inevitably, more than one man in Marsh’s close circle of friends would become entangled with Alice. It was hardly surprising that among them was Lyndon Johnson, the brash, big-eared up-and-comer from the hill country outside Austin. Johnson was twenty-one years younger than Marsh and had a boundless enthusiasm and confident swagger that left little doubt that he was going far. He was a kid on the make, and his drive, ambition, and sense of mission were such that he could electrify a room with his presence. He was also an unabashed womanizer, given to crassly bragging about his masculinity and sexual prowess—the kind of man for whom Alice must have been an irresistible challenge. The strong physical attraction between Lyndon and Alice was undeniable, though they were so discreet in public that not even their closest friends could pinpoint exactly when in the late 1930s their relationship blossomed into a full affair.
Alice must have known that Marsh would see their affair as a double betrayal. He regarded Johnson as the most promising of his political protégés and, according to George Brown, another of LBJ’s early backers, “loved Lyndon like a son.” Marsh had known Johnson only since 1936, when he had phoned a mutual friend, Welly Hopkins, and asked him to arrange an introduction to the dark horse candidate from Austin’s Tenth Congressional District. Johnson, who was then twenty-nine and a former schoolteacher ridiculed by the opposition as a “young, young man,” was running for Congress on a New Deal platform. Marsh, who had a nose for talent, immediately recognized a man of destiny when he saw one and not only decided to back Johnson in the race but saw to it that Austin’s two major dailies, the American and the Statesman, also backed him. Johnson ended up winning a ten-way runoff, and the following year he headed to Washington, in no small part thanks to Marsh’s editorial support. “Marsh was effective because he put the power of his papers behind him openly,” said Hopkins, who, although married to Alice’s close friend and cousin, suspected that the high-rolling tycoon had helped Johnson only as a way of extending his own influence. “I think that Lyndon was smart enough to see through Marsh all the time. I don’t think Marsh was ever out-thinking Lyndon a damn bit.”
From then on
Marsh inserted himself into Johnson’s life, generously providing funds for his campaigns, as well as cash for his private needs, and offering advice on everything from political strategy and publicity to proper health care. What may have begun as a cynical attempt to influence politics evolved into a sincere friendship, with Marsh, in his self-appointed role as political godfather, doing everything in his power to help the junior congressman achieve his ambition of one day being elected to the highest office in the land. When Johnson arrived in Washington, Marsh offered to help ease his way and introduced the unknown freshman to powerful behind-the-scenes figures, arranged meetings with wealthy financiers and publishers, and, according to Martin Anderson, publisher of the Orlando Sentinel, who had once been the beneficiary of the same treatment, “tutored and groomed” Johnson during his “swaddling days” in politics.
At one point, Marsh even offered to bankroll Johnson for life. In 1940, Johnson was on vacation with Marsh and George Brown at the ritzy Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia and had been worrying out loud about the difficulties of managing on an elected official’s salary. Marsh, with typical bravado, offered to solve the problem with a simple wave of his hand. He proposed a deal that would make LBJ a millionaire many times over: Marsh had some oil wells that were already operating and pumping money out of the ground, and he would work it so Johnson could buy them for next to nothing, in exchange for a share in the future profits. Marsh had already passed a real estate deal Johnson’s way, selling his wife nineteen acres on Lake Austin for $8,000, which he knew was in an area slated for development and would skyrocket in value; Lady Bird Johnson later sold the waterfront property for $330,000. This is to say nothing of the money-losing Fort Worth radio station he had talked Johnson into buying, arguing, “Some day it will be worth $3 million.” Marsh’s oil wells would eventually be worth far more than that and promised to make Johnson financially independent for the rest of his life. But looking ahead to the Senate and possibly the presidency, Johnson decided to steer clear of the oil interests, saying, “It could kill me politically.”
The Irregulars Page 17
