“I’ll never make it. I’m going to throw it all in the Potomac.”
“Do as you like. But I suggest you think twice and let me know how it’s going next week.”
Evening seemed to come all too quickly. With the help of her French maid, Mimi, she would clear off her worktable, light the candles, and prepare to greet her friends, the Bruces, Muffie and Henry Brandon, Carter Brown, Brooke Astor, Senator Heinz, and young Dallas Pell. She wanted her parties to be as exciting and successful as those she had hosted on Dumbarton Avenue. So she smiled encouragingly, listened intently, and had coffee served at the table to keep conversation going. The guests would leave around eleven, remarking on how well she was coping on her own. Her task completed, she could return to her beloved ghosts.
In 1974, almost all of Susan Mary’s time was taken up by the book. Occasionally, she would pull away to listen to the rumors about Nixon’s eagerly awaited resignation. Even Joe, who had always been careful never to weaken the president’s position, had come to think that stepping down was the best thing Nixon could do. Still, Susan Mary was more interested in the events of the 1940s and 1950s than in current affairs. She read dozens of books on the period to make sure her notes and comments would be impeccable. Marietta had given up her share of the project, and the entire load now lay on Susan Mary’s shoulders. In April, Doubleday sent her an advance of five thousand dollars, which she divided between her children. By November, the book was finished and Susan Mary decided to reward herself with a trip to Laos, where Charlie Whitehouse had been serving as American ambassador for a year and a half. She invited her sister-in-law Tish Alsop who had been a widow since Stewart Alsop’s death in May, treating her to the journey. At the end of February 1975, the two women set off, intent on leaving their worries and solitude behind.
The ambassador’s residence in Vientiane had a swimming pool and tennis courts, but Tish and Susan Mary had come to see something of the country. Charlie took them to meet General Vang Pao, the enemy of the Communist Pathet Lao and the CIA’s faithful ally, who was based in Long Tieng, a mountain military fortress accessible only by air. The diminutive general was waiting, standing at attention in a khaki uniform decorated with three gold stars.
“Can’t you just imagine him on horseback next to Genghis Khan?” Susan Mary whispered to her sister-in-law.
“Shush, he speaks English.”
The general actually spoke a sort of soldier’s French that was supplemented with expressive grimaces and gestures. He signaled to Charlie to sit next to him, while the ladies sat on a sofa with the first of the general’s six wives. His officers stood behind him. They all drank warm whiskey that made Susan Mary’s head spin. She watched lunch being prepared: large plates of white rice swarming with flies. As long as they serve it up quickly, she thought. Unfortunately, the general launched into a violent monologue, railing against the prime minister, Souvanna Phouma. “Ah, Ambassador, Souvanna is nothing but a woman, a frail little poplar tree all atremble even when there is no wind. You see, for us it’s a life or death situation, and there’s an 85% chance that we’ll end up dead. Let’s eat.”1
The ordeal was not over. Like Levin in Anna Karenina, Vang Pao wanted to show his guests the agricultural progress that had been made among the local Hmong tribes under his command. The group boarded a beat-up helicopter with no doors or seat belts that the general piloted himself. The ancient machine lifted off with difficulty before sputtering high above the mountain valleys, where the mist rose like steam off a cup of tea. Susan Mary took refuge at the back of the cabin and shut her eyes, while Tish remained bravely seated at the edge of the precipice, working out whether her life insurance would cover her children’s college education. Charlie mentally drafted their obituaries.
The next day’s activities were less adventurous. Susan Mary and Tish toured Ban Houayxay, an outpost on the Mekong River. Martinis in hand, the two women sat watching the river. The sun was setting. A refreshing evening breeze carried the gentle sound of the nearby temple bells, and it was hard to believe that the Vietcong had passed through the sector only a day before. For the rest of the trip, when she was not flying around in a helicopter, Susan Mary was at the hairdresser’s. There were a number of official dinners and lunches, and she wanted to honor the reputation of her cousin Charlie and not look windblown and unkempt among the silky Laotian princesses. She managed somehow, and Tish thought she looked as neat and elegant as usual, and far more relaxed. At the end of two marvelous weeks, they parted ways. Tish went back to the United States, and Susan Mary continued traveling, passing through Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Tehran, where her friends the Helms were posted. Finally, she stopped in London on her way to Washington. A month later, Saigon fell and the Pathet Lao seized power in Laos, driving out the royal court in Luang Prabang as well as the unfortunate Hmong who had trusted the United States.
On her return, Susan Mary resumed work on the book. Doubleday suggested a cover she described in a letter to Joe as “lovely and romantic, a collage which I think you will like. We owe (forgive me—I still say ‘we’) much to the blurbs which will be on the cover.”2 Arthur Schlesinger, Douglas Dillon, David Bruce, the actress Kitty Carlisle, and the popular author Emily Kimbrough had all contributed their endorsements. These were printed with a photograph of Susan Mary in serious mode, her brow furrowed like a disapproving governess. “Those stern brown eyes,” as Bill Patten used to say about his young wife. The book was dedicated to Mrs. Jay out of a sense of filial duty, but she was the most grateful to Joe and Marietta. Joe had supported her literary endeavors and allowed her to sign the book with the name Alsop, something her editor had insisted on. Marietta had not felt the slightest resentment after having chosen not to appear as a coauthor and was planning a reception in New York in September to celebrate publication. As to the book’s actual content—“I am not ashamed,”3 said Susan Mary when she received the first proofs. She even let herself show unusual self-satisfaction, repeating the compliments she had received (“David Bruce thinks my letters are better than Janet Flanner’s”4) and comparing herself favorably to her old schoolmates, who “seem to have done so little with their potentialities. Rich, charming, everything going for them, now I flee when I meet one of them on the street.”5 Obviously, Marietta was not part of this depressing category, and Susan Mary continued to sing her praises. “You have done more with your life than any of our contemporaries. You are the star of our time.”6
Of course, Susan Mary was capable of making things up out of pride, discretion, or the desire to spare her friends the chore of comforting her. This stoic politeness did not foster intimacy, but she had always preferred to serve herself a second glass of sherry rather than call out for help. Still, an optimistic tone, a little strained perhaps, began to color her mood in the spring of 1975. “Life ahead is going to be very gay.”7
At last, it was time for rewards. The reviews in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Library Review were all favorable. Readers also responded to the book, which went through six printings, selling more than twenty thousand copies. When Letters to Marietta was published in England the following year, Antonia Fraser praised it in an article titled “So Chic, So True, So Sad,” noting the pertinent analyses and vivid style of a white-gloved reporter in postwar Paris who served up a mixture of politics and cosmopolitan life against the somber background of her husband’s chronic illness.8
Like so many brownie points, Susan Mary collected her reviews and sent them to her family. She graciously accepted all requests for book signings and interviews. In fact, promoting the book was an unexpected pleasure. Finally, she was the person whom people were waiting for, listening to, and photographing.
For a November book tour in Texas, Oscar de la Renta suggested she wear a navy blue mohair coat over a dress in the same color. She arrived in Dallas on November 18 and was driven to bookstores in Doubleday’s Cadillac. A chill went down her spine as she recognized the route, familiar to her from a fateful afte
rnoon twelve years before. “I hear Jackie’s voice in Dumbarton Avenue sitting on the sofa, clinging to Joe’s hand: ‘It was so hot, we turned the corner and I saw the underpass and thought, Oh, good, it will be cool for a few minutes, then I heard the shot, the first one.’”9 Susan Mary also appeared on a popular television show and did so well that the channel’s director offered to make her a reporter in Washington. Flattered, she refused, seeing a “mental picture of Joe’s face if he hears that I am to do political reporting.”10 In her place, she suggested Sally Quinn or Barbara Howar, both well-known journalists. She left Dallas for Austin, where her friend Walt Rostow took her to a football game. It was a real disappointment—there was not a single cowboy hat in the entire stadium. The local men were dressed in tweeds, as though attending a steeplechase in the south of England. So much for local color. She gave a few radio and television interviews before heading off to the university library to do research for her next project.
The Adventures of Lady S.
The success of Letters to Marietta had encouraged Susan Mary to begin work on a biography of a remarkable woman, Lady Sackville. It was her English editor, George Weidenfeld, who had suggested it.
Victoria Sackville had inherited her temperament and impressive head of long black hair from her mother, a Spanish dancer named Pepita. She spent her childhood in the difficult position of an illegitimate child, for although Pepita was dearly loved, she was not married to the English diplomat Lionel Sackville-West, who had set up houses for his irregular family in Paris and Arcachon. Upon Pepita’s death in 1871, Victoria was dispatched to a convent, then rescued and sent to Washington in the capacity of hostess to her father, who had been appointed plenipotentiary in the American capital. Queen Victoria and the American First Lady approved of this rather daring initiative, which suited eighteen-year-old Victoria very well. She knew she was up to the task in spite of her total lack of experience. Intelligent and willful, she did the job brilliantly, turning a number of heads in the process. Her own remained steady. She wanted to marry money. When she returned to England with her father, who in the meantime had inherited Knole House in Kent and the title of Lord Sackville, she met her cousin, who also happened to be the handsome heir to her father’s title and estate. Marriage followed. All her problems seemed solved; besides, she and her husband loved each other so much, it was said, that they never wanted to get out of bed in the morning. They soon had a daughter, Vita, who would become an author and the lover of Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf.
The marriage cooled after a few years, but Victoria was well on her way to fame, reigning over Knole House and her entourage of friends and dependents. She successfully fought two lawsuits filed against her, the first by one of her brothers who wanted his share of the family fortune, and the second by the family of John Murray Scott, who had inherited part of the Wallace Collection and had given some of it to his friend Victoria. Lady Sackville did not hesitate to defend herself in court and air out family secrets. She seduced the judges as easily as she had seduced the other men she crossed paths with, including J. P. Morgan, Lord Kitchener, Rudyard Kipling, William Waldorf Astor, Auguste Rodin, and especially the architect Edwin Lutyens, whom she tormented with an irresistible mixture of tenderness and aloofness. Her daughter and son-in-law, Harold Nicolson, were also treated to her violent whims and took them with less patience. Toward the end, there were so many family quarrels and reconciliations that Susan Mary—fascinated though she was by all that charm, fury, and bad faith—had trouble keeping everything straight.
Research on Lady Sackville began during the summer of 1975. Kitty Giles, whom she had known since her time in Paris, got in touch with her cousin Nigel Nicolson and arranged a trip to England, during which Susan Mary stayed with Nigel at Sissinghurst and with Lord Sackville at Knole. Thanks to charming Kitty, Susan Mary was able to borrow suitcases full of family papers that she took with her to Maine, terrified at the idea that she might lose them at the airport. She spent months deciphering letters and other documents covered in Lady Sackville’s tiny, faded, irregular hand, dictating them to her secretary, and blushing at the erotic descriptions of Victoria’s honeymoon. She found a few more papers in Texas, but “nothing on Victoria, my girl. Naughty thoughts run through my mind—I sell everything I have here to the University of Texas under an assumed name, tell Nigel tearfully that documents have been stolen (having xeroxed them secretly), write Lady Sackville, retire to [the] finest villa in Tuscany, or should it be a château in Burgundy?”11
Susan Mary enlisted her friend Kay Evans to help her read old newspaper accounts of Washington diplomatic life. Every ten days, Kay would bring back a harvest from the Library of Congress, where she had been patiently combing through years of microfilmed newspapers.
When at last she started to write, Susan Mary found the task as difficult as research had been enjoyable. It was the first time she had actually tried to write a book, and her subject was a complex, multifaceted woman. In fact, one critic would later reproach her for not having captured the many nuances of Lady Sackville’s character, unlike Nigel Nicolson, Victoria’s grandson, whose book Portrait of a Marriage subtly depicts the loving but complicated relationship between his parents, Vita and Harold. This criticism seems unjustified, for although Susan Mary was interested in decor and described with evident relish the dresses and bibelots that ornamented her subject’s life, she also managed to revive the turbulent emotions of a heroine more passionate than she herself was, but with whom she shared a taste for the French language, a love of art, diplomatic experience, and a certain savoir-vivre. Both Susan Mary and Lady Sackville knew how to behave. When they broke the rules, they did so with style.
To make things harder, Susan Mary was constantly interrupted because she could not and would not forgo her obligations to her family, friends, and Washington society. Joe, whom she often saw, invited her to a dinner for the Berlins with Henry Kissinger and to another for the Harrimans. She organized a reception in honor of Frank Wisner and his fiancée, Christine de Ganay. In August 1976, she went to Barbados to comfort the recently widowed Marietta, who felt lost and broken since Ronnie’s death. After three exhausting weeks, she flew to Paris to attend her goddaughter Anne de Rougemont’s wedding and visit Cy Sulzberger, who was mourning the loss of his wonderful wife, Marina, who had died in July. When Susan Mary finally came home, the presidential campaign was in full swing, pitting Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter. It would be a political autumn.
“Is it true, Mrs. Carter, that when you and your husband find that you are filled with lust for someone of the other sex you kneel down one on each side of the bed and pray for guidance?”
“What nonsense, we have never done such a thing in our lives, who said that asinine thing?”
“Your husband, this morning, in Pittsburgh.”12
If he was elected, Jimmy Carter had said he would do all he could to restore family values. This was not enough to convince Susan Mary to vote for him, and indeed, Gore Vidal was not alone in thinking that the Democratic candidate took his initials a little too seriously. On September 23, she gave a dinner party before the first of three televised presidential debates. All the journalists who were invited took notes. Joe was dismayed by the former Georgia governor’s mediocre performance.
“He looked so tired, don’t you think it was just that?” asked Susan Mary.
“Politicians are not permitted to get tired,” Joe coldly remarked.13
In the end, Susan Mary decided to vote for Ford, “betraying my party and in hot disagreement with all my best friends.”14 Results had not been so close in sixty years. On election day, Joe took Susan Mary to New York. The vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, was having a party with a few friends in his enormous Fifth Avenue apartment to celebrate Henry Kissinger, who was about to leave the job of secretary of state, which he had held under the Nixon and Ford administrations.
“It is tragedy that his plans should be left unfinished,”15 Joe lamented glumly, sittin
g next to Susan Mary in a bar later that evening. She was nearly as depressed as he was.
Joe never relented about President Carter, whom he criticized for his lack of realism and tendency to moralize. This was not true of Susan Mary, whose misgivings gradually evolved. Naturally, she also remained on friendly terms with Kissinger, who came one evening to watch one of David Frost’s televised interviews with Richard Nixon. Feeling that the former president had minimized his role in foreign politics, Kissinger got himself into such a state that Susan Mary ended up writing a letter of protest to Nixon. He answered without delay: “I pointed out over and over that without Henry’s creative ideas and diplomatic skills we would never have succeeded with our China initiative, the Soviet SALT I agreement, the Vietnam Peace Agreement and the progress toward reducing tensions in the Middle East. My own evaluation is that he will be remembered as the greatest diplomat of our times.”16 Susan Mary was asked to deliver the message to Kissinger.
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