by Unknown
That was the bad news. The good news was that Miss Baldrige asked if I’d be interested in coming to the White House and interviewing her about Mrs. Kennedy. She even suggested she’d help me assemble some clips to go along with the story. This wasn’t your standard brush-off. I was being invited to the White House, if not to speak to the First Lady, then to report on the next best thing: a fellow Ancient who was in the news and had a seat at the table of power. My visit was scheduled for the last week in March 1961, during my spring break.
I flew down a day early on the Eastern shuttle out of LaGuardia Airport and spent the night in Chevy Chase with my parents’ friends, who celebrated my foray into big-time journalism by taking me to dinner at the National Press Club. My hosts discreetly drew my attention to the well-known names dining around us. The next morning, I walked through the White House East Gate a few minutes before my eleven o’clock appointment.
Miss Baldrige greeted me in her featureless office, where she was stationed at a very unglamorous, government-issue desk, surrounded by unpacked boxes (the Kennedys had moved in only seven weeks earlier). Despite the drab decor, I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. Miss Baldrige—who insisted I call her Tish, though that seemed impossible—was meticulously dressed in a tailored dark wool suit and silk blouse, the apotheosis of poise and hospitality. (After her White House years, she would go on to become a bestselling author of books on etiquette and social manners.) Perhaps she was merely extending an extra dose of kindness to a fellow Miss Porter’s girl, but Miss Baldrige had clearly given thought to my visit. She had compiled a stack of clippings about the First Lady from around the world, secured me a guide, and even arranged for me to meet the President. He was scheduled to spend time with a group of physically challenged children in the Rose Garden, she said, and I was meant to join them.
My guide that day would be Priscilla (Fiddle) Wear, yet another Miss Porter’s alum, who had graduated in 1958, the year before I arrived. Fiddle (a childhood nickname because she couldn’t pronounce Priscilla) was something of a legend at school because of her job at the White House, but I’d never met her before.
All I knew was that she and her roommate, Jill Cowan, had left Goucher College to work for then Senator Kennedy on his presidential campaign and both now had jobs at the White House. Fiddle and Jill were inseparable. Jill (predictably dubbed Faddle) worked in the press office; Fiddle was an assistant to Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary.
Fiddle led me from Miss Baldrige’s office in the East Wing, and I was immediately impressed (and a little intimidated) by her confidence and professionalism, by the way she navigated the halls so confidently, as if no space was off-limits to her. As we walked, she mentioned that because of spring break, the White House was jammed with tourist groups and friends of friends; this would make it very difficult to get across to the West Wing. So she took me on the scenic route, through a maze of underground tunnels and hidden stairwells, feeling her way along. After a couple of mistaken detours into a kitchen and a laundry, we emerged in the West Wing just outside the Cabinet Room.
Seeing that it was unoccupied, Fiddle opened the door and beckoned me to follow her. I made my way cautiously around the huge wooden table, touching the backs of each of the chairs, imagining all the important decisions and heated debates that took place in this room. It seemed impossible that I was here.
“Wouldn’t Miss Smedley be impressed?” I said, invoking the name of Farmington’s revered modern European history teacher. Adopting Miss Smedley’s grande-dame voice and theatrical gestures, I imagined what she would say if she were with us. “And here is where FDR debated the merits of i-so- lation-ism and measured the costs of going to war with Nazi Gerrrrmany.…” Fiddle laughed and joined in, and for a minute or two we were back to being schoolgirls, waving our arms like Miss Smedley, playing at an imaginary chalkboard in the Cabinet Room.
Back in the hallway, a woman nearly ran us over as she rushed to the Oval Office.
“That was Dr. Janet Travell, the President’s doctor,” Fiddle whispered.
I waited for a while by Fiddle’s desk, which was a few steps outside the Oval Office, while she went back to her typing. Through a window, I could see Miss Baldrige guiding a group of children into the Rose Garden, which was my cue to go outside and join them. Fiddle turned from her typewriter and escorted me outside, delivering me to Miss Baldrige. Tish motioned for me to stand next to her among the kids. The two of us towered over them as we waited for the President to emerge. This was so much more than I had counted on. Then the doors of the Oval Office swung open, and out into the Rose Garden came the President of the United States.
Of course, I was nervous and starstruck; what high school student wouldn’t be?
I was curious to see how the real person compared to what I had read or imagined. President Kennedy was taller, thinner, more handsome in person than he looked in photographs. He was patient and charming with the children, shaking hands and talking to each one, crouching down to their level. He was, after all, a politician, the most gifted and successful in the country. Although this was probably just one of many meetings and ceremonial functions on the schedule that day for the President, no doubt promptly forgotten the moment he moved on to the next obligation, he was also keenly aware that the few seconds those children had in his presence would be something they’d remember forever.
When my turn came to shake hands with him, Miss Baldrige stepped in. She introduced me by name and mentioned that I was a student reporter.
“Where do you go to school?” he asked, taking my hand in his.
“Miss Porter’s School, sir,” I managed to say. The whole thing felt unreal.
A smile of recognition. “What brings you here?” he asked.
“I’m writing an article for our school paper, the Salmagundy, about the First Lady.”
“Are you a senior?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are you going to go to college next year?”
“Wheaton or Hollins.”
“Well, it’s nice to see you,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
And he was gone.
The story I wrote about my experience, “Ancients in the White House,” filled almost the entire issue of the Salmagundy, and was a great success around campus. On the day it appeared, my classmates were reading it everywhere I looked. I was proud, even more so after I sent the issue to Tish Baldrige, who promptly wrote back: “A charming article—written with the deftness of an Ilka Chase, a Clare Luce and a Mme de Staël, all rolled into one.” She was nothing if not an expert in the social graces, a pro at making a teenage girl feel good about herself. I slipped her letter into a photo album my parents had given me.
So when the call came from the White House press office a year later, it seemed to make at least a little sense. The story I wrote, after all, was essentially about the link between Miss Porter’s and the White House. Tish must have remembered me and my interest in journalism, awarded me a few bonus points for being part of the Farmington sisterhood, and suggested me for the open position. I’m speculating here, because I never asked or was told why I was offered the internship. I only knew that I couldn’t say no.
Which was great for me but less so for my father. This sudden opportunity meant he had to make an unpleasant phone call, pulling me out of the summer job that he’d arranged for me as a receptionist-in-training at a New York law firm. I felt terrible about this, and about going back on my word, but he was only too glad to do it. “If it’s a choice between interning in the White House and training to be a receptionist in Manhattan,” he said, “it’s no contest.” I was on my way to Washington.
I grew up in eastern New Jersey in a rambling Colonial farmhouse, one of the oldest in Middletown Township. The main house dated to 1781, with two substantial additions from 1800 and 1850. It had fourteen rooms, including seven fireplaces, a pine-paneled library with the original hand-hewn
beams, and a ballroom, a remnant of a more elegant past, which we rarely entered except for birthday parties and Christmas celebrations. My mother named our house Still Pond Farm. “No more moving,” she said.
Had I not gone to Washington that summer, I would have commuted one hour by train to midtown Manhattan every day and spent the weekends with my family and friends swimming at the beach club half an hour from our farm, working in the garden with my mother, and helping with chores on the property.
My father, a trust officer by day at the Fidelity Union Trust Company in Newark and a gentleman farmer on the weekends, was happiest in his overalls on his tractor, mowing our sixty acres of fields and orchards. When I think of him, I think of him on his tractor, chugging along in the late-afternoon light on warm summer evenings, climbing down only when it was time for dinner.
It was, from all outward appearances, a life of preppie privilege. I had a sister, four years my senior, whose nickname was Buffy. I had a brother, Josh, two years ahead of me in school, who was a junior at Princeton, following in the footsteps of our father, after graduating from St. Paul’s in New Hampshire. I had another brother, Jimmy, four years younger than I, who would soon be sent away to prep school in Rhode Island and then on to Princeton. My sister Deb, six years younger than I, would be attending Miss Porter’s in a couple of years.
And, yes, we wore a lot of plaid.
All the WASPy and preppie boxes were checked, and yet I didn’t feel, growing up, that we were excessively privileged. This was due in large part to my mother. She was epically, virtuosically frugal. She would never consider hiring a carpenter or painter or other craftsman to fix something if she could do it herself. By the time I was eight years old, when we left New York City for the farm in New Jersey, I was well aware of my mother’s “I’ll-do-it-myself” ethos. It was impossible not to be. As her first project in our new home, I had watched her steam off the old, peeling wallpaper in every room, patch the walls, and paint them herself. Then she tackled the fading slipcovers and curtains, buying fabric and sewing new ones. She built bookcases and refinished old pieces of furniture; she scraped and painted all the wooden shutters; she made circular felt skirts for my sisters and me with appliquéd scenes from Currier and Ives; she drove endless car pools, cheered us on at all our school games, cleaned the house, cooked our meals, and tended the chickens and sheep on the farm (the animals were not pets but sources of food, though my siblings and I could never stomach the notion of eating the lambs that grazed on our property). She was a dynamo of energy and self-sufficiency, with a domestic skill set that would have made Martha Stewart proud.
This was how she was programmed to behave. Her ambition in life had been to get married, raise a brood of well-mannered children, free her husband of any duties that might interfere with his all-important career, create a happy, comfortable home, and manage the family finances so that we never spent more than we had. In this she wasn’t much different from other moms in our neighborhood and across America at the time, although I suspect she was an extreme version of the species.
My mother was an attractive woman of above-average height (5′7″) with delicate facial features, a slender silhouette, perfect posture, and short brown wavy hair. Everyone called her Liddy, which seemed to suit her. She was friendly and outgoing, and could display the silky, upbeat charm of a hostess when required, but more often than not, she carried herself with an air of seriousness and heavy responsibility. She was rarely frivolous, although I do remember her going on silly diets—such as eating only bananas for a week—every now and then. The diets were pointless; her inability to sit still practically guaranteed that she would never be overweight. (At one point her father, who had a farm nearby, hired a cook for us because he was worried that she was working herself into exhaustion. The cook departed within the month when we learned that she was draining my father’s gin bottle and refilling it with water—and my mother, to our delight, resumed cooking all our meals.) My father, Randy, was a large, jovial man—with big ears, a big nose, and a big, ready smile. I do not have a single photo of him in which he’s not smiling, laughing, or being playful. But behind that smile lurked something darker, something that only later, in the sixties, would be diagnosed as manic depression. As young children, we didn’t see much evidence of his sadness and despair, largely because in his lowest moments my mother would take over and cover for him. Those were very difficult years for her, but I don’t think she had a single moment of regret for choosing this man as her partner—and vice versa.
My parents had been married for thirty-six years when my father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1973, at the age of sixty-eight. He had always loved hats, and after he died our mother put together a collage for each of his children with photographs of him in his favorites. I still have it hanging in my office today.
If I’m making our home in New Jersey in the 1950s and early ’60s sound like an idyll of rural gentility, that’s because it felt that way to me at the time. I found happiness there and learned to love being alone. In what strikes me now as admiring mimicry of my mother’s domestic dynamism, I devoted hours, as a young teenager, to playing with a massive but elegant wooden Victorian dollhouse that rested on a table in my bedroom. I electrified it, painted the rooms, hung wallpaper, and decorated it with store-bought period furniture, always to scale. I was engrossed in every detail, not only technically but emotionally. I populated the dollhouse with an imaginary French family—a couple named Marie and Paul Perot, with three children—for whom I created elaborate backstories and life crises. As I made up situations and dialogue for them, I would move them around from floor to floor, room to room. Devoting my spare hours to that dollhouse was liberating; it gave me a sense of control. My French family had to obey me, not the other way around.
If this was rebellion on my part, it was of the most private kind. It suited my personality. I sometimes think I was born with an internal governor on my emotions, set permanently between medium and low. I didn’t question my parents, and would never dream of speaking back to them. I rarely fought or even argued with my brothers or sisters. I think I was too afraid of confrontation and its consequences.
We inhabited a self-contained world where nearly every phase of our lives was mapped out for us, defined by the expectations of our so-called class. My sisters and I curtsied as children and always rose when an adult walked into the room.
We were taught that every kind gesture required a thank-you note in return. We said grace at every family meal and “passed love” around the table by holding one another’s hands and squeezing in turn. We heeded the implicit agreement that politics or religion was never openly discussed, for fear of causing offense.
Money was a taboo topic; it was distasteful to mention how much one made or spent on anything, and wealth was definitely not something to be flaunted. It was assumed that everyone we knew was a Republican and shared the same Protestant faith.
We were constantly reminded that self-reliance was the greatest virtue. We each had a schedule of chores on the farm that went beyond making beds and maintaining tidy rooms. My job was to keep the border of the flower garden weeded and neatly trimmed. When major disasters struck, such as a septic field destroyed by flooding, we all grabbed shovels and buckets to help our mother and father rebuild it.
Most important in our family was where we went to school. It was simply assumed that we would attend one of the prestigious boarding schools that my mother and her siblings attended: Miss Porter’s, St. Paul’s, St. George’s.
Education was a virtue, but this went beyond virtue: Having one of these schools on your résumé was like a shorthand embedded with status and significance.
The Social Register, the annually published volume listing prominent families in New York, was a fixture on my mother’s desk. I don’t recall my parents consulting it religiously—not like the comic figure of Sir Walter Elliot at the beginning of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, who “never took up any book but the Baronetage�
�—but it surprises me now to admit how important that book was in my parents’ circle.
There was no more status-significant event in my youth than being “introduced to society.” Since we had lived in both New York City and New Jersey, my mother insisted that my sisters and I make our “debuts” in not one but two states. This decision was motivated by good intentions on her part—she wanted only the best for us—but it was a nerve-testing experience for me. It wasn’t that I minded getting dressed up in a long white silk dress with white kid gloves up to my elbows. It was that these debutante balls, universally derided as “cattle shows,” required the presence of young men as our escorts. Meaning: I was obliged to invite one or two boys of my acquaintance and a boyfriend as well.
My problem was that, by my eighteenth birthday, I was on a run of bad luck—or I should say no luck—with boys. The ones I took a shine to tended to look past me, to the girls who were a little more, well, girly. If I had carved out an identity for myself at this point, it was as an athlete. I’d been captain of the field hockey team and the basketball team at Rumson Country Day School and was such a fast runner in track that I’d run on the boys’ team against the fathers on alumni field day—and won. Hardly an asset when it came to dating.
My greatest, and only, success in the boy department had been gaining the notice of Louis Timolat when we were both in the eighth grade—and letting him kiss me. Once.
And that was the last kiss anyone bestowed on me through high school.
So I didn’t have a boyfriend for my New Jersey debut at the Rumson Debutante Ball of September 1961, which took place at the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club. I had asked two brothers of Farmington friends, who graciously agreed to be my escorts. They were perfect gentlemen during the evening, but it didn’t shock me that their overriding agenda was to meet other girls there. I had also invited two of my brother’s classmates from Princeton, but they considered me a kid sister from the start and ignored me all night. I can recall all this with bemusement rather than malice now, but at the time, the petty slights stung. It was a hot, sticky, uncomfortable evening, and my dominant emotion, the one I remember all these years later, was disappointment.
