PRINCE: Please, please, Mr. Mayflower. All right, all right. What do you want me to say?
JOE: I want you to recognize that there is a threat out there.
PRINCE: All right, all right, there’s a threat, there’s a threat.
JOE: (Calm and dignified) That’s very interesting, Your Highness. Though it doesn’t surprise me. (Takes out pad) When did you first become aware of this danger?
PRINCE: Well…how about…last Wednesday?16
Art Buchwald could protest all he liked, everybody knew that Joe Mayflower was Joe Alsop. Joe took it very badly, considered suing Buchwald, and forbade his friends from seeing the play. Stewart flew to his brother’s rescue, but most of Washington just chose sides and was highly amused. There were other distasteful happenings. One Sunday in November, obscene drawings referring to Joe were made on a car parked in front of a church in their neighborhood. “A ridiculous little episode,”17 said Susan Mary dismissively, supporting her husband without ever alluding to his sexuality. Then she found hurtful words about Joe on her own car. Things got even worse when the compromising photos of Joe taken in Moscow in 1957 resurfaced and began circulating through town, probably at the initiative of Soviet agents. Fortunately, everybody remained calm and the incident stopped there.
In spite of these worries, the year ended on a positive note. Billy (now known as Bill) married Kate Bacon in Boston on December 19. Kate’s mother, lovely Kitty, was the youngest of Susan Mary’s cousins. It was a family marriage prepared by the two mothers and by Joe, who went to a lot of trouble because he loved his stepson and wanted things to be done properly. Two years earlier he had been similarly involved in Anne’s wedding to George Crile, the son of a good family from Cleveland. “It is odd for a man who has never had children of his own to enjoy being a father and to long to be a grandfather,” Joe Alsop wrote to one of his friends.18 Susan Mary also remarked on this enthusiasm, but with a touch of acidity: “Joe sees romance in the touching way that childless people often do.”19 Because she thought her daughter was too young to be getting married—pretty Anne had just turned eighteen—she had tried to delay the event, behaving, she said in a letter to Marietta, “like the Eastern dowager in a high dog collar.”20 She did not protest with much conviction, though, and the marriage took place on September 21, 1968, the date originally decided on by the young couple. Anne and George moved to the West Coast, where Susan Mary was happy to go and visit them. Barefoot in the California sunshine, she felt, for a short, blessed moment, that she was no longer proper Mrs. Alsop.
Susan Mary liked speed, especially behind the wheel. She hated waiting and easily grew impatient. Although new things interested her, at the end of the 1960s the world seemed to be changing at a dizzying pace. As soon as she got used to the idea of rock and roll being played at elegant dinner dances, Bob Dylan replaced Elvis Presley. After Courrèges, she thought hemlines would remain high, but once she had her skirts tailored, she discovered that Saint Laurent was lengthening them again and even making flowing ankle-length dresses. What was one to do? Luckily, being thin never seemed to go out of fashion. In New York, she had to give up an old favorite, the red-and-gold opera house, and become acquainted with the new Metropolitan Opera, which had been built as part of Lincoln Center. There were also unknown faces at parties. “Very clever or very pretty people who have nothing to do with New York society as it was when I was young. Rather more fun on the whole—not a fine old name in the lot.”21 But Susan Mary remained intrepid. In January 1972, she treated herself to a little plastic surgery. It pleased Joe and she happily reported to her son, “Everyone should have their faces lifted, it’s morale building.”22 She went to see the new shows, such as the film Alice’s Restaurant and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, with the Margeries and their son Gilles. During the musical, the audience whistled in disapproval when they heard the actors recite classic, respected texts. “I thought that Jesus, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King were still OK—clearly I was wrong. Back to school.”23
An age was passing. Joe’s mother, always warm and loving with Susan Mary, died in June 1971. Stewart was hospitalized for a harmless problem that turned out to be leukemia. Bravely, he battled the disease to the end, going through repeated stays in clinics and transfusions for which Joe often donated his own blood. Mrs. Jay had also grown weaker, suffering strokes in 1967 and 1969 that hampered her autonomy without dampening her severity. Powerless, she remained imperious and demanding, with brief moments of sentimentality that made her cling to her daughter. Old Mrs. Jay was very fond of Anne and happy about the birth of Bill’s son, Sam, her great-grandson, in the summer of 1971. The baby spent the first few months of his life at Dumbarton Avenue.
There were also upheavals in foreign politics. Faced with the difficult task of pulling America out of Vietnam, Nixon, assisted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was pursuing negotiations begun in Paris, while continuing to use force on the ground. The offensive side of this strategy pleased Joe, who was moreover very supportive of Kissinger, a figure he had immediately recognized and adopted as one of his own. A Washington newcomer in 1969, Kissinger was a Harvard professor who had become the darling of Georgetown and a close friend to Joe and Susan Mary.
On February 7, 1971, preparations for the Alsops’ usual Sunday dinner for twenty-four were already under way when the president called and recommended that Joe turn on the television at ten in the evening. Kay Graham, who was single-handedly running the Washington Post empire since the death of her husband, went into Susan Mary’s bedroom to call her team. Kissinger had barely arrived for dinner when the phone started ringing. He received eleven calls over the course of the evening, with an impressed but annoyed Susan Mary serving as his switchboard operator. At ten o’clock, the guests gathered around the television, but there was no White House speech, only a short announcement from the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu.
“Why on earth did he call us?” Joe asked Susan Mary. “We look like awful fools.”
“That’s Washington for you. How is one to interpret a President’s thinking?”24
The next day, South Vietnamese troops began invading Laos in hopes of cutting supply lines to North Vietnam. The operation reawakened violent antiwar protests in the United States.
The ongoing war in Vietnam did not prevent Nixon and Kissinger from seeking détente with China and the Soviet Union. On July 18, 1971, Kissinger came to see the Alsops on his return from a secret trip to Beijing, where he had met with Zhou Enlai. It was the first time in almost twenty-five years that American and Chinese officials had come into contact. That evening, the atmosphere at Dumbarton Avenue was positively electric. An excellent storyteller, Kissinger outdid himself, and although he did not go into the substance of the talks, what little he told was highly interesting.
The following spring, the Nixons had a small reception for the eighty-eighth birthday of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Joe’s impertinent cousin, who was feared and revered by all of Washington. Over drinks, Susan Mary chatted with a particularly warm and relaxed president. He told her about his recent meeting with Mao, whom he found physically exhausted but intellectually alert. Their conversation continued at dinner. Joe, who approved of the opening of relations with China so as better to confound the Soviet Union, was nevertheless worried about America’s gullibility concerning Chinese leaders. Piqued, Kissinger tried to reassure him.
“We trust none of them,” Kissinger said.
“Nor do they we but they have had a chance to sum us up, judge us, have some sort of idea of how we think, our pattern of thought,” said Nixon. “Surely this is useful?”
“It’s not just useful,” declared Joe, more Mayflower than ever, “it’s tremendously important.”25
In November 1972, the Alsops made their own journey to Beijing. Susan Mary had been studying and could recite all the Chinese dynasties by heart.
“This is the trip of my life.”26 It was almost an official voyage, and it included
a meeting with the Chinese prime minister. From half past nine in the evening until one in the morning, Joe listened to Zhou Enlai talk about birth control, agricultural production, and Leonid Brezhnev, whom Zhou found even more fearsome than Khrushchev. Seated next to the two men in the huge reception hall, Susan Mary took notes.
“Is there anything I can do for you during your visit, Mr. Alsop?” asked Zhou at the end of the conversation.
“There is, Sir. I would like to take my wife traveling into the interior.”
“Where?”
“To Yunnan and Szechwan. Would that be impossible?”
“Not at all. When would you like to go? Would three o’clock suit you?”27
At the appointed time, they boarded a military plane. Resplendent in his brand-new red fox fur hat, Joe revisited the places he had flown across thirty years earlier with General Chennault. But Susan Mary’s favorite memory remained the Forbidden City.
“There were tall willows, water and two old musicians playing their instruments against the walls, because the sound, the resonance is better that way. It was haunting, just a moment of old China. Silence, but for the musicians. Then noise, interpreters, all that, but we noticed the moment, and loved it.”28
The Breakup
Devotion is not always disinterested. It can help fight boredom, build up credit, or even serve as subtle revenge upon a person whose ascendancy is reduced by age or sickness. None of this applied to Susan Mary. Her upbringing had left her with a sharp sense of responsibility, “a noble child of Duty,” Joe used to say, raising his eyes to heaven. Susan Mary liked to think this was the driving force behind her actions, and perhaps it was. Taking care of her mother seemed as necessary and normal as writing to the elderly woman in France who had looked after her children, or visiting the sick at Washington’s General Hospital, something she had done for years. Susan Mary liked being of use—she would lend a dress or connect people with such rapidity that those she helped hardly realized it. Her children had always been the first objects of her attention, often financial in form. In fact, where they were concerned, generosity came more naturally to her than an open ear. It was through letters and presents that she showed her love.
But the full measure of Susan Mary’s talents unfolded when duty crossed paths with friendship. She could be silent when it was fitting, full of sensible advice and resolute when needed. This happened in July 1965, when she stayed at Marietta’s side in London after the death of her cherished Adlai Stevenson, and in August 1972, when she delayed her return to the United States to be in France with Elise Bordeaux-Groult, whose asthma and nervous fatigue had got the better of her. A year later, Elise’s suffering grew worse and Susan Mary flew to France again, trying to stand between her sick friend and the inevitable. On June 27, Elise died in the American Hospital. A few days later, her family and friends dined together on the Rue du Bac. The evening had begun normally, as Marina Sulzberger recounted. Then “one by one they broke down. Susan Mary a rock. She is fabulous. But all of us undone.”29
During the following summer, walking through the pine forests of Northeast Harbor, Susan Mary came to a decision, the most agonizing of her life. Had Elise’s death made her more aware of the passage of time? Had Joe uttered one cruel word too many? She realized that he would not change, and that if she did nothing, she would eventually fall apart. She had to protect herself. As it was, she lived in fear and felt herself shrinking under her husband’s harsh criticism. Her self-esteem, not strong at best, was relentlessly shaken, and her insecurity grew as, unsuccessfully, she tried to fend off attacks that left her dispirited and full of doubts. Strong emotions had never appealed to her; she preferred them watered down with gentle banter. Instead, she was caught up in continual and exhausting confrontations that she made worse by playing them over and over in her head. In addition to the suffering caused by her marriage, she found herself forced into a state of perpetual self-analysis, an exercise she disliked as she equated it with self-indulgence.
“I really do think that we are lovers, otherwise we wouldn’t be so miserable about hurting each other.”30 This heartrending admission, made a few years earlier, still held true, but Susan Mary was no longer content with such tortured satisfaction. She hated fuss, so she left quietly. The Washington Star of September 26, 1973, published a brief announcement noting the separation. Susan Mary soberly declared that she was grateful for the twelve years she had spent with her husband and that she hoped to see him often in the future. “Joe is a wonderful bachelor and a wonderful stepfather,” she wrote.31 Even while publicly declaring the failure of her marriage, she hid her wounds under a veil of ironic affection.
So Susan Mary took her life into her own hands. She moved into an apartment rented to her by a friend, perched in the tall fortresslike complex called the Watergate. There had been a lot of talk about the Watergate since June 1972, when five men working for Richard Nixon’s reelection committee were caught in the building trying to burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters. Their arrest had not harmed Nixon, who was reelected with relative ease. Over time, the president’s role in the break-in leaked out. In May 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee hearings began. Susan Mary found them “horribly fascinating,”32 but wanted to believe that the president had not known what was going on. However, it was revealed that a hidden system for recording conversations existed within the White House itself, and that the president was frantically doing all he could to hold up investigations.
The only good point of the apartment was its view of the Potomac, but Susan Mary always kept the curtains drawn because she thought the window frames too hideous. She also disliked the white walls, which she covered in paintings and the Watteau engravings of monkeys that she and Bill Patten had bought in Paris. The entryway was hidden behind a screen, and the chintz sofas and French furniture warmed up the three little rooms where Susan Mary received her guests. She told them calmly she was starting afresh, and said she missed nothing but her Georgetown garden. Her friends, who were not surprised by her separation from Joe, admired her nerve and almost believed in her high spirits.
It was not clear whether Susan Mary’s unrelenting self-control hid deep suffering, or whether her delicate coolness kept her safe from the disorder of more violent emotions. Sometimes, in letters, the mask would fall and reveal something of her distress. “I am infinitely glad to be clearing out of here,”33 she wrote to Marietta before joining her in Barbados in December. For once, the bougainvilleas, tropical punch, and relaxation beneath the white coral arches did nothing to restore her energy. “I feel like a piece of old wet flannel.”34 It took a stay in Florida on the plantation of her Whitehouse cousins and a few days at Marietta’s house in New York to help her recover her strength and start reading again. Toward the end of January 1974, the psychoanalyst she had been talked into seeing found her in better form.
She had no regrets about leaving her husband, who was also shaken up by the separation, but she could not help addressing the subject in letters to her son, concluding, “Having loved him and fought for him was a waste of fourteen years.”35 This negative appraisal contrasted with the pathetically gushing tone of her letters to Joe himself. Before leaving for Barbados, she had thanked him for his Christmas present, a gouache by Hubert Robert, wishing that “despite the immense worry and sadness our marriage has given you, you will remember the happy times. There are so many.”36 Two months later, during which they saw and called each other regularly, she confessed her nostalgia: “Darling, I write to celebrate our wedding anniversary because it was such a good show—it lasted a long time and gave great pleasure to many people—above all to me. Looking at your high ceilings the other night, comparing them to my claustrophobic apartment, I felt how fortunate I had been, how much I owe to you, and how much I then and now loved you. Circumstances did not aid us, stars were crossed, but my marriage vows of February 16 hold.”37
Holed up in an apartment she disliked, Susan Mary was confronted with painful lonelin
ess. She still loved the man she had left, and felt burdened with the defeat of the separation for which she partially blamed herself. In spite of all this, she managed to begin a new life. She found strength in her friends and in the things that accompanied her in her Watergate exile, particularly an old typewriter and bundles of letters. The past had called out to her, welcoming, familiar, and infinitely malleable. She had decided to transform her life into a story. It was a metamorphosis that would be her salvation and greatest accomplishment.
IX
The Pleasure of Writing
From Paris with Love
The idea had come from Marietta. She and Susan Mary would gather their fifteen years of correspondence and offer it up to the public in celebration of their friendship. The book would have the added benefit of giving Susan Mary something to do and would add another jewel to Marietta’s crown, proving she was as talented in literary matters as she was in politics and diplomacy. (Marietta had done a great deal for the Democratic Party before going on to represent the United States at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under the Kennedy administration.) They went through old trunks and shoe boxes, and Marietta asked Ken McCormick, senior editor at Doubleday, to sample their letters. He read for fifteen minutes in the library of Marietta’s New York town house while the two women smoked nervously in the room next door. Convinced by what he had seen, he told them to get started. A contract would arrive in the following day’s mail.
The real work began early in the summer of 1973. Susan Mary and Marietta had to unearth, sort out, and reassemble their correspondence. Both had kept almost everything they had written between 1945 and 1960, when Susan Mary was living in France and Marietta in England. Mrs. Jay also gave them the letters her daughter had sent her from Paris, which would be published as though they had been written to Marietta. As her friend had predicted, the discipline and pleasure of daily work calmed Susan Mary’s frayed nerves and broken heart. Sitting at her felt-covered bridge table, she forgot the ugly apartment and let herself be carried back to her youth, that new and wonderful country one rushes through carelessly, vowing to return. With melancholy joy, she rediscovered the days of Bill’s illness, the times when Duff used to take her on his lap, when gowns on loan from Dior waited in their tissue paper for her to make them bloom with triumphant flare. Without rewriting them entirely, Susan Mary shook out letters, removing old secrets and the most embarrassing cases of her naïveté as a wide-eyed American girl arriving on the Continent. She fretted over her banal style, frivolous preoccupations, and imprecise storytelling. Her editor, McCormick, regularly received anguished phone calls.
American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) Page 14
