by Ann Beattie
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Also by Ann Beattie
Distortions
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Secrets and Surprises
Falling in Place
The Burning House
Love Always
Where You’ll Find Me
Picturing Will
What Was Mine
Another You
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon
Park City
Perfect Recall
The Doctor’s House
Follies
Walks with Men
The New Yorker Stories
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ISBN 978-1-4391-6871-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-6873-8 (ebook)
A portion of the poem “Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon” by David Kirby appears courtesy of the poet. The article “Patricia Nixon, Wife of Former President, Dies at 81” is reprinted with permission of the Los Angeles Times (Copyright © 1993 Los Angeles Times). The logo for The Tech is reprinted with permission of The Tech.
For Jane and Bob Hill
Contents
The Lady in the Green Dress
Stories as Preemptive Strikes
The Faux Pas
Major and Minor Events of Mrs. Nixon’s Life
Mrs. Nixon, Without Lorgnette
Approximately Twenty Milk Shakes
Friendly, Faithful, Fair
The Quirky Moments of Mrs. Nixon’s Life
Moments of Mrs. Nixon’s Life I’ve Invented
Mrs. Nixon’s Junior Year Play: The Romantic Age
Mrs. Nixon Plays Elaine Bumpsted, a Role Formerly Acted by Bette Davis
Mrs. Nixon Gives a Gift: Stories by Guy de Maupassant
Mrs. Nixon on Short Stories
Caracas, Venezuela, 1958
The Writer’s Sky
Mrs. Nixon Considers Automatic Writing
The Letter
Mrs. Nixon Reads “The Young Nixon” in Life,
Serving Mrs. Nixon First
Letters and Lies
A Story Occasioned by Considering Richard Nixon and Dolphins
My Anticipated Mail
Merely Players
Mrs. Nixon Lies, and Plays Hostess
Prophetic Moments
My Meeting with Mrs. Nixon
I Didn’t Meet Her
The Writer’s Feet Beneath the Curtain
King Timahoe, with a Coat Neither Cloth nor Republican
At Mr. Jefferson’s University
Mamie Eisenhower Is Included in Tricia’s Wedding Plans
Mrs. Nixon Does Not Bend to Pressure
Mrs. Nixon Hears a Name She Doesn’t Care For
The President, Co-owner, with Mrs. Nixon, of Irish Setter King Timahoe, Called “King,” Meets Elvis Presley, Known as “The King” but Called “Mr. Presley” by the President
Mrs. Nixon Reads The Glass Menagerie
Photo Gallery
Mrs. Nixon Thinks of Others
A Home Movie Is Made About Mrs. Nixon in China
Mrs. Nixon Gets the Giggles
Cathedrals
What Did Mrs. Nixon Think of Mr. Nixon?
Questions
The Nixons as Paper Dolls
Mrs. Nixon Is Taken on a Drive, 1972
Rashomon
David Eisenhower Has Some Ideas While Sitting by the Fire
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Mrs. Nixon Joins the Final Official Photograph
“The Dead” in New Jersey, 1990
Mrs. Nixon Sits Attentively as Premier Chou Offers the First Toast
Catalog Copy
Cookies
General Eisenhower Tries Role-Playing
Mrs. Nixon N + 7
Mrs. Nixon Explains
Mrs. Nixon Has Thoughts on the War’s Escalation
Mrs. Nixon Indulges Her Feelings
Mrs. Nixon Uses Her Powers of Persuasion
Mrs. Nixon Reacts to RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
Possible Last Lines, with (Curtain)
She once said her “only goal” was to “go down in history as the wife of a president.”
My Back Porch in Maine
Mrs. Nixon’s Thoughts, Late-Night Walk, San Clemente
Chronology
Notes
About the Author
A note on the book: What you will read is based on research. There is a chronology appended that will allow the reader to know when certain events or moments in Mrs. Nixon’s life occurred. Also at the back of the book there are notes that correspond to individual sections. I imagine dialogue to which I had no access; I do my best to write as I think my characters would think and speak, based on what I’ve read about them. In some cases, factual events are used only as points of departure, which should become clear; those times I write fiction will be recognizable as such. The majority of events, letters, and names are real. (As a young man, Richard Nixon did date Ola Florence Welch; King Timahoe was the Nixons’ dog; Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State.) My readings of many texts, from a story by Maupassant to the play The Romantic Age, are conveyed as I understand them.
Tuck is given credit (he denies it, somewhat hollowly) for putting on an engineer’s hat and waving the Nixon train along in 1960, somewhat enraging the candidate who had just begun a rear platform speech. He is also alleged to have rapped sharply on the glass of the driver’s compartment in the Nixon campaign bus one day in Iowa, ordering the driver to start up. He did. The only problem was that Mrs. Nixon was still in town, a fact that was not discovered until the caravan was several miles down the road.
—Frank Mankiewicz, Perfectly Clear:
Nixon from Whittier to Watergate
Mrs. Nixon
Mrs. Nixon’s Nicknames, Including Her Code Name as First Lady
Buddy
Miss Vagabond
Irish Gypsy
St. Patrick’s Babe in the Morn
Babe
Pat
Miss Pat
Patricia
Dearest Heart
The White Sister
Starlight
The Lady in the Green Dress
In The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss has described a TV broadcast during which Mr. Nixon faced some hard questions about his stance on Vietnam. After the show ended, “
Roger Ailes went looking for Nixon. He wound up in an elevator with Nixon’s wife. She was wearing a green dress and she did not smile. One thought of the remark a member of Nixon’s staff had made: ‘Next to her, RN looks like Mary Poppins.’
“‘Hello, Mrs. Nixon,’ Roger Ailes said.
“She nodded. She had known him for months.
“‘How did you like the show?’ he asked.
“She nodded very slowly; her mouth was drawn in a thin, straight line.
“‘Everyone seems to think it was by far the best,’ Ailes said. ‘Especially the way he took care of that McKinney.’
“Pat Nixon stared at the elevator door. The car stopped. The door opened. She got off and moved down a hallway with the Secret Service men around her.”
Her possible thoughts?
Mr. Ailes is a loyal supporter, but these people can be a bit naïve.
Or: It pleases Mr. Ailes very much to think he’s found the way to elicit a positive response from me. Why should I comply just to please him?
Perhaps: “Mr. Ailes, has it ever occurred to you that I’m a serious person, and that the conclusions you have drawn with such certainty are expedient and self-serving?”
“If I were a vain woman I might turn the subject to myself—the same way, by being so outspoken, you turn the subject as much to yourself as to my husband. And so I might ask you whether you didn’t think this was the dandiest dress you’d seen in a long time, and whether we shouldn’t applaud: for my husband; for the advent of television; for your job; for my dress, which I tailored myself. What do you say, Dr. Pangloss?”
“Mr. Ailes, do you find it possible to think that yes, I am Mrs. Nixon, but I am also a woman on her way somewhere, that I am just passing through in a perfunctory way, and that even if I were to answer, whatever I say does not really matter?”
Better: “Will you remember tomorrow, Mr. Ailes, that when we spoke I was wearing a green dress? I will certainly remember that you were wearing a white shirt, because you don’t have as much leeway as I do, or the freedom most any woman does, about how to dress.”
“Forgive me for not answering, but the truth is that I am thinking about my own neatly styled hair and clothing. I don’t have to say a word, but you more or less have to say something to me, don’t you? So why not admire the dress I bought at Lord & Taylor and paid too much for, instead of pretending my husband is the only topic of interest. If you liked it, I might think better of you.”
“Oh, excuse me, I would so love to stay and discuss this, but you see, I brought my pet tortoise with me and it has run away, and I must try to find it before it buries itself in the dirt that is our lives.”
“Mr. Ailes, I may very well have forgotten to turn off the bathwater.”
Stories as Preemptive Strikes
Mrs. Nixon (before she was Mrs. Nixon) had many nicknames, and one of them was Buddy. She liked the nickname because she felt her given name did not suit her. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would be thrilled to be named Thelma. Her mother insisted on naming her that for reasons unknown. The baby’s father—who maintained she had been born later than the time of her actual birth—called her his St. Patrick’s Babe in the Morn (soon shortened simply to Babe). As far as I can tell, she was born somewhere near midnight the day preceding St. Patrick’s Day, 1912, though that doesn’t really detract from her father’s fondly effusive Irish feeling. Babe lasted for quite a while as a nickname, though Buddy intruded in childhood. Buddy suggests a tomboy, and perhaps any girl who grew up on a farm and did chores and took the dusty world as her playground would seem tomboyish, but as with so much about Mrs. Nixon, new and reliable information recedes with time. Upon entering college, Thelma became, at her own behest, Patricia, then was referred to as Pat, carrying her about as far away from someone else’s intention about her identity as most people dared go in those days.
A lot of fiction writers I know own a book called What Shall We Name the Baby? because in the heat of writing—or even after cold deliberation—even the simplest name just won’t pop into the writer’s head. The name Ann is forgotten, Jim unremembered. Sometimes writers want to consider etymology, or to use New Age names to express the mystical quality of the child, or some quality that is hoped for—but I’m thinking of something else: the writer’s panicky sense that all names have escaped him or her, and unless the writer can immediately find something (“Jane!”), the character will evaporate before ever being realized. Writers will tell you that when they remembered the name John, suddenly everything became possible. But because they have to look up a name, when no name can be conjured up, they have this book near their desks—unless the writers write on the kitchen counter, say, and then they have it in the fruit bowl. (Think about how many prospective grandmothers have been misled by noticing this book.)
Buddy. Names, nicknames, they’re fascinating to writers, but they also cause anxiety because they’re so elusive, and because writers have to come up with so many of them. Few people have a gift for the perfect name or nickname, and many such adult monikers are given without the victims’ awareness. Henry Kissinger, for example, called Haldeman and Ehrlichman “the Fanatics.” (H. R. Haldeman was Nixon’s Chief of Staff; John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs.) Children have to accept their names, at least until they can protest. I don’t know how Mrs. Nixon felt about being Buddy. Bottom line, most of us only really want nicknames invented by those we love. My husband has so many nicknames for me that it’s lucky we don’t have pets. When he calls, I answer to most anything: that day’s nickname will undoubtedly be something I don’t recognize except for the tone. The only time I stop dead is when he calls me Ann. When he addresses me directly, I’m in trouble. Thelma/Buddy/Pat may have answered to even more names, but we’ll never know.
I think of her, though, as Mrs. Nixon. Perhaps Richard Nixon thought of her as Pat or as some endearment we don’t know, such as Fuzzy Bunny, but when he referred to her, it was usually as Mrs. Nixon. An egoist like Nixon would of course see people as extensions of himself, so that when he was referring to his wife he was implying a certain dignity, insisting upon the respect he felt was inherent in the position she occupied (thanks to him). Since he often spoke of himself as “he,” which is much more bizarre, it’s understandable that he would refer to his wife formally. He thought aloud and liked to fabricate stories, and if he hadn’t been president, many of his fictions would be highly hilarious, but you’re stopped from laughing about this dissociation when you realize that he had control of the “red telephone”—its nickname is the only way it’s referred to—and that when he was drunkenly wandering the corridors of the White House talking to the portraits hung on the walls (according to Edward, a.k.a. Eddie, Cox, his son-in-law), one of them might have answered and told him to go make mischief by holding down the little button.
In thinking aloud, he often used the expression “and so forth” as a kind of shorthand for what didn’t need to be elaborated—especially since he was often talking to himself. He was his own best audience, and his predictable gestures, his distinctive mannerisms, must have felt like reassuring forms of applause, replacing the usual hand clapping. Nixon—like many politicians—while often in the presence of other people, was essentially talking to himself. He devised stories for others to tell, whether or not they were the truth, then played devil’s advocate, becoming first the lawyer for the prosecution, then for the defense, because he was a lawyer, and that is the way lawyers think. He did this out of the courtroom, however, and got to keep the witnesses as long as he wanted, or to dismiss them instantly, whichever seemed more advantageous. He was accustomed to hearing his own voice; others lay buried in the landslide of words. He is reported to have made fifty-one phone calls in one night during the Watergate mess—though that was certainly a worse quagmire than most of us ever experience.
Nixon and his team are described by longtime New Yorker writer Jonathan Schell in The Time of Illusion this way: “The Nixon Admini
stration was characterized by, among other things, fragmentation. What the Nixon men thought was unconnected to what they said. What they said was unconnected to what they did. What they did or said they were doing at one moment was unconnected to what they did or said they were doing the next moment. And when they were driven from office, they left behind them not one but several unconnected records of themselves.”
In their feints and dodges, Nixon and his players exhibited a versatility that equaled the range of professional actors. A later leader, Ronald Reagan, would be wittily described by Gore Vidal as “the acting President,” but Nixon may have outdone him in the projection of personal fantasy. Often, Nixon elaborated scenarios he knew would never materialize, tacitly encouraging the listeners’ imagination, then revealing his own opinion. The outlandish CIA operative and pseudonymous mystery writer E. Howard Hunt put on a red wig to go off on assignment—or what he understood to be an assignment, or imagined to be one because he considered his thinking superior to that of those who might give him an assignment—while also understanding that playing the crazy could not really hurt him. Truly crazy people would buy into his game, and the people who weren’t could always dismiss him if things backfired. When not helpful, Hunt was a wild card that could be discarded in the fast and loose nonrules of the game: he was—you know—not quite right.
As covert operatives, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the caterpillar-mustached leader of the White House “plumbers,” were like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern run amok. Jonathan Schell writes that Liddy thought it would be a good plan to hire expensive prostitutes to “lure Democrats to a yacht rigged with secret cameras and recording equipment. The cost would be about a million dollars. [Attorney General John] Mitchell found the plan too expensive, and rejected it.” The government was presided over by a president who was most at ease when he could consider many possibilities and all their variables; what might sound comical and sophomorically contrived to most people would always seem to him truly unique, viable options. John Belushi, had he come along a bit earlier, could have led the way—as almost any of his characters but perhaps most helpfully as Samurai Chef.
