American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167)

by De Margerie, Caroline; Fitzgerald, Frances (INT)

  All this reading and writing sparked off literary dreams. Her lover’s identity and the epistolary nature of their affair began to evoke illustrious parallels. She saw herself as Lady Bessborough at the side of Ambassador Granville,22 or as the Duchess of Dino—although, unlike Duff, Talleyrand had no mustache. These noble references peppered their correspondence with the magic of the past. Susan Mary began to pay closer attention to her style.

  It was during this period that her life effectively passed from fact into fiction, but not quite in the manner she had hoped.

  Although British novelist Nancy Mitford was a comic genius, she had little imagination. Her books read like her letters, and her letters resembled her conversation: brilliant, irreverent, confident, sometimes aggravating, always teasing, often to the point of cruelty. To her, serious matters were best left to bores and self-pity to chambermaids. Like Wilde, she transformed frivolity into art, and like Wodehouse, her books re-created a safe little universe that seemed untouched by the horrors of the contemporary world, a place where a lucky few cultivated wit as the highest form of civility. The milieu Mitford’s books describe was very closely modeled on that of her family and friends.

  Nancy Mitford had been in love with Colonel Gaston Palewski since she had met him in London in September 1942. She followed him to Paris, although she remained married to Peter Rodd. She lived in the same neighborhood as Gaston, but not in his house. “You know our cold respectability,” he had explained, strictly forbidding her from moving into his apartment on the rue Bonaparte.23 Nancy’s love affair was not just with Gaston but with France in general and it would last until death. After her move to Paris, all her books were dedicated to her favorite country. The Blessing, published in 1951, celebrated France’s superiority over England. According to Nancy, life in France was delightful, dowagers charming, women smartly dressed, religion tolerant, the sun always shining, politics intelligent, and men irresistible skirt chasers. Gaston figured in The Blessing as the idealized and charming Frenchman Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a Gaullist, former member of the Resistance, collector of art and women, yet very fond of the Englishwoman he casually marries at the beginning of the novel. This satisfying fiction made up for the disappointments and sorrows of Mitford’s real life, where Palewski remained as elusive as he was dissipated.

  Susan Mary and Nancy knew each other fairly well. They met at the Coopers’, at the Pattens’, and at the lunches Nancy gave at her house on the rue Monsieur. Both shared a passion for the old, silent Paris captured by Atget, the still, private streets where foreigners rarely trod. Together, they had knocked on doors, opened gates, and, peering through windows, made out the sepia-toned light of inaccessible gardens. In the spring, they waited for the chestnut trees to bloom in ice-cream-colored shades of pink and white. After the dusty summer came the clear blue days of autumn, and later, the occasional bursts of winter light upon the gardens in the Tuileries. Paris had taken hold of their hearts.

  Nancy gave Susan Mary a brief appearance in The Blessing under the name of Mildred Jungfleisch, a young, pretty, and earnest American woman who talks only “about conferences and vetoes and what Joe Alsop had told her when she saw him in Washington.”24 No doubt satisfied by this preliminary sketch, Nancy revived Mildred Jungfleisch in her next novel, Don’t Tell Alfred, a book inspired by the guerrilla war waged by Diana Cooper against the unfortunate Lady Harvey, whose husband had replaced Duff as British ambassador. In the book, the new ambassador’s wife is named Fanny, and her predecessor, Lady Leone. Described as the most beautiful woman in the world, Lady Leone secretly continues living in the embassy, assisted by her confidante, Mildred Jungfleisch, who sneaks in baskets of food and helps her entertain amused Parisians who desert the embassy’s drawing rooms to line up at her door.

  Mildred is described as belonging to a clan of Americans, “the Henry James type of expatriate, who live here because they can’t stick it at home.”25 The new ambassador’s wife tries to find a way to corrupt Mildred and rid herself of Lady Leone. With this task in mind, she questions one of her husband’s aides about Mildred:

  “What does she like best in the world?”

  “English top policy makers.”

  “What, MPs and things?”

  “Ministers, bankers, the Archbishop, Master of the Belvoir, editor of The Times and so on. She likes to think she is seeing history on the boil.”

  “Well, that’s rather splendid. Surely these policy makers must be on our side? Why don’t they lure her to England—luncheon at Downing Street or a place for the big debate on Thursday?”

  “I see you don’t understand the point of Mildred. They worship her at the House—they can hardly bear to have a debate at all until she’s in her place there. She’s the best audience they’ve ever had. As for luncheon at Downing Street, why, she stays there when she’s in London.”26

  Although she had been cast as a blonde with a pageboy haircut, it was easy to recognize Susan Mary. Mitford’s keen eye for character had captured her friend’s devotion to Diana Cooper and taste for politics and intellectual aspirations, noting, “She puts aside certain hours every day for historical study.”27 Mitford also took aim at Susan Mary’s popularity (“it was impossible to give a dinner party in Paris without her”28) and adaptability (“she could produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion”29).

  Although she seemed not to have recognized her cameo appearance in The Blessing, Susan Mary immediately identified herself in Don’t Tell Alfred when the book was published in 1960. Accommodating and reasonably immune to vanity, she was nevertheless hurt to find her sentimentality and love of ideas ridiculed. Fortunately, Nancy did not know the lengths to which Susan Mary went in her desire to seem well informed. At the time, nobody realized, for example, that Susan Mary’s letters to Marietta Tree were, occasionally, directly inspired by Janet Flanner’s gin-soaked columns about Paris for the New Yorker. Mitford would have surely included this information with acerbic relish.

  All the same, Susan Mary sent a few copies of Don’t Ask Alfred to her friends. In truth, compared to other examples of wicked portraiture in which Nancy often indulged, Susan Mary’s character had been gently crafted. It was almost flattering, more teasing than caricature.

  The Blessing, nevertheless, had angered Susan Mary for its open anti-Americanism. Mitford was as virulent as a band of Stalinists in her hatred of the United States, a country she judged to be blundering, uneducated, and hideously modern. In her novel, she had concocted a talkative and self-important American named Hector Dexter whose job it was to persuade the recalcitrant French to swallow the bitter medicine of the Marshall Plan. The character was so grotesque and dislikable that Mitford turned him into a Communist mole to avoid being strung up by her American friends. Still, there was an amusing truth in the portrait.

  If Susan Mary had not liked the way Nancy had portrayed her countrymen, she was even angrier when her friend told her that the conversations she had heard around the Pattens’ dinner table had helped her fine-tune horrible Dexter. Susan Mary had no illusions about her country and blamed America’s lack of interest for all things foreign. She often mocked the grandiloquent style imposed upon American journalists, regardless of the context (“lots of words like history-making, soul-stirring, breathless, and of course, hero used freely”30). Neither did she hold back from criticizing American doings she found absurd, such as the government’s distribution of cotton togas to several elected officials in the spring of 1950, supposedly as protection against radioactivity in the event of a nuclear war. She was shocked by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt that had begun in the State Department, and by the news that General MacArthur considered using the atomic bomb against China at the end of 1950 in retaliation for its involvement in the Korean War. In spite of all this, she felt that no foreigner, let alone Nancy, who had never set foot in America, had the right to be so negative. Their friendship grew distant, but pretty Mildred, �
�this ghastly pedantic blue stocking bore of a Mildred Youngfleisch,”31 as Susan Mary would say with a sigh, had been immortalized.

  In Sickness and in Health

  Regular routines have a bad reputation and are rarely celebrated by those who practice them. Susan Mary complained at times about the monotony of her life, judging it to be useless, especially when she compared herself with her friend Marietta Tree, who had returned to New York and become an activist for the Democratic Party. “I am sick of running a travel agency,” she told Marietta. “You do so many things of use and importance. I sit here and, except for an absorbing life with my two little children, the rest is meeting trains and making hotel reservations for the mothers of girls I didn’t even like at school and taking them to the American Hospital when they have acute appendicitis, which turns out to be overeating half the time.”32 She also regretted that Bill had obliged her, in the name of the professional discretion imposed on all diplomats’ spouses, to turn down the offer to write a weekly column for Harper’s Bazaar. Invited to inaugurate a community center near Lille in the presence of the French health minister, she went off, trembling, in a pretty hat and came back in high spirits, basking in the warm welcome her accent and carefully rehearsed speech had received. “That’s the life for a woman. How sad to have had a taste of it just one sweet hour and now back to doing up Anne’s nappies.”33

  Susan Mary loved taking care of her children even though, if truth be told, she rarely changed their diapers herself. As sincere as her regrets about not having a career of her own might have been, they remained periodic and rarely troubled her serenity. The atmosphere at the embassy and the nature of Bill’s work had changed for the better since their arrival. In May 1949, the Francophile David Bruce, who until then had been head of the French branch of the Marshall Plan under the overall European supervision of Averell Harriman, replaced Ambassador Caffery. Chip Bohlen became his number two. David and his second wife, Evangeline, and especially Chip and Avis Bohlen, were old friends of the Pattens. Much to Bill’s delight (for he had grown weary of economic and financial questions), Chip took him on as part of his team. As Susan Mary began her sixth year in France, she had only one wish: that Bill’s position—secured by her efforts, divine providence, and the State Department—continue on an even course. But turbulent changes were on the way.

  The first incident was not too serious. The Aldrich cousins had decided to take back the house on the square du Bois de Boulogne so that they could rent it at a better price. This was fair enough, but it created a problem, because the postwar Parisian housing crisis was still very much a reality. Hearing the news, their circle of friends came together to help. There were some grandiose plans, including an apartment in the Hôtel Lambert, but this never came to fruition. Finally, in April 1950, the Pattens found a house on the rue Weber, just steps away from their former home. The children would be able to continue playing in the Bois de Boulogne. While she was waiting for her furniture to arrive from the United States, Susan Mary amused herself by cobbling together a sitting room à la Pompadour and a Three Musketeers–themed dining room with the help of shabby old cinema sets, which she rented in a rare and deliberate spate of bad taste that appalled the nanny, Duff, and Charlie de Beistegui.

  Then Bill fell badly ill at the beginning of June. What began as pneumonia evolved into heart failure. Dr. Varay came to the house morning and evening. One of Bill’s legs was paralyzed and a pacemaker was put in his bedroom. An English specialist was called in for a second opinion and recommended that Bill be transported to London for a bronchoscopy, a plan that Dr. Varay opposed. Trying to keep herself from panicking and painfully aware of her ignorance in such matters, Susan Mary decided that Bill would stay in Paris. His condition varied constantly. He often had trouble breathing and this made his pulse race even faster. Suffering led him to utter spiteful remarks, which Susan Mary bore without answering back, sad to see him grasp so hopefully at each minor and passing remission. At night she wrote to Duff, and sometimes, while Bill was sleeping in the bedroom next door, she called him on the telephone and wept uncontrollably. After ten days, the worst was over. It was decided that Bill and Susan Mary would leave for the United States on July 1 so that Bill could undergo treatment at the Lahey Clinic in Boston.

  In the early 1950s, steroidal treatments were just beginning to be used in America. They worked quite well on Bill, and soon he was strong enough to play canasta and alternate between cortisone and Veuve Clicquot. Surrounded by family and friends, Susan Mary felt safer than in Paris, even though she had to placate Mrs. Jay and Mrs. Davies, who hated each other so much that each of them had brought a wheelchair for Bill’s arrival, neither of them trusting the other to do so. Susan Mary also noticed that several friends who came to visit seemed moved by one of the rarer emotions of the human soul, that strange, secret pleasure taken from seeing somebody, particularly a loved one, suffer.

  The doctors said Bill might live another four years. “I personally think I would rather not have my life prolonged, he is different from me,” remarked Susan Mary, not without a certain harshness.34 She was amused to see the doctors’ perplexity when confronted with young Billy’s perfect lungs. “All their ideas on asthma heredity are upset and they are writing learned papers for the medical journal on him.”35 One question gnawed away at her but remained unasked: would they be able to return to Paris?

  After two weeks in Boston, the doctors allowed Susan Mary to take Bill to Bar Harbor, where the children were already waiting. The solidly constructed house had held up against the passage of time and the ocean winds. For once, Susan Mary found it a welcoming shelter and even approved of the old-fashioned carpets and muted colors of the William Morris wallpapers. Set up in a second-floor bedroom, Bill spent his days on the balcony, away from the children and the nanny’s pitiless war against the rest of the household staff. Susan Mary left all decisions to her mother. She protested only once when 250 missionaries from one of the charitable organizations her mother sponsored held a meeting in the sitting room. This was all right, but when they began singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” at the tops of their lungs, it launched Bill into heart palpitations.

  Soon Bill was able to move around, and he began to take drawing classes with an eccentric local artist who crept about town in a velvet vest and floppy cravat, like a character out of La Bohème. When Susan Mary watched her husband in the harbor, drawing the rocking fishing boats in happy concentration, the pressure she had been feeling since his health had deteriorated began to subside.

  Bill had to return to the Boston clinic twice for checkups and spent a few days in a local hospital to have an abscess looked after that had formed “from having had so many shots.”36 The doctors decided that he did not have lung cancer and that the Pattens could return to Paris. And returning to Paris meant being near Duff again.

  So Bill recovered, resuming a more or less normal existence, and was even able to go to Italy twice the following year. In May 1951, he and Susan Mary went to Rome to visit Bill’s sister, who had married an Italian. They met the black nobility, who lived in the Vatican’s august shadows, the aristocrats in their palaces, and Princess Bassiano, who was trying to revive lyrical poetry with her review, Botteghe Oscure. For the length of their ten-day visit, the Pattens were all the rage. One of her admirers told Susan Mary, “Madam, everyone has been saying that with five kilos more you would have a tremendous success in Rome.”37 That spring, however, everybody’s eyes were turned to Venice.

  “I feel like Stendhal’s young hussar in Le Rouge et le Noir trying to describe the battle of Waterloo,”38 began Susan Mary’s account of the party given in the Palazzo Labia by Charlie de Beistegui on September 3, 1951. Twenty years later, Paul Morand would echo her words, “An Italian ball, like in Stendhal!”39 Cocteau noted, “Socialites don’t understand the secret of theatre—what is striking and what isn’t. According to the magazines, it would seem that Diana, Elizabeth, and Daisy wore their costumes well.”40 Moran
d was there, Cocteau was not. Neither was Nancy Mitford—she had not wanted to spend two hundred pounds on a costume. But Jacques Fath came as the Sun King in white and gold, along with Chilean billionaire Arturo Lopez, who was disguised as a Chinese ambassador, and Marie-Laure de Noailles, who was dressed as the Lion of the Piazza San Marco. Other guests were Leonor Fini, Orson Welles, Gene Tierney, Dalí, Dior, Cecil Beaton, Christian Millau, Deborah Devonshire, the Marquis de Cuevas and his ballet company, the Aga Khan and his wife, and Venetian firemen dressed as harlequins. It was a mélange of fine old names and new money, young beauties and aging beauties, celebrities from two continents. Seven hundred people came to the ball, which their unsmiling, white-wigged host had wanted to be as splendid as in the old times, when the Serenissima reigned unchallenged.

  A number of tableaux vivants were indeed striking. There was Diana Cooper as Cleopatra, right out of the Tiepolo fresco in the palazzo’s main hall, and Elisabeth Chavchavadzé, magnificent as Catherine the Great. Daisy Fellowes, wearing an enormous feather on her head, claimed to be the incarnation of the pre-Columbian Americas. Susan Mary had watched Diana get dressed. While Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel transformed her into the Egyptian queen, Diana sewed a little bag for Duff’s domino so he could keep his flask and not risk running short of alcohol. This turned out to be unnecessary, for the banquet was sumptuous like everything else. Susan Mary noted with admiration that even the shoes seemed historically authentic. She and her friend Odette Pol-Roger had decided on simple dresses and handsome velvet masks from Reboux. At three in the morning, Susan Mary went to bed, but Odette continued dancing to the accordion music among the crowds on the piazza, where the ball had overflowed into the Venetian night.