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

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

  The Congress Dances was published in the United States and Britain in the spring of 1984, and, like Susan Mary’s previous works, it was well received. It would be her last book. Her poor eyesight, hardly improved by two cataract operations, forced her to give up research, much against her own will, for it had been an activity she had thoroughly enjoyed, both in itself and for its rewards. Her four books, together with a few literary reviews in the Washington Post, had lent to her reputation, put her on television, and brought her into lecture halls as Susan Mary Alsop, the writer. None of the women she knew, neither friends nor rivals, even the most beautiful, rich, and influential among them, could claim as much. She was proud to have her name printed in the card catalog of the Library of Congress, next to that of Joe, who, after retiring in 1974, had finished his magnum opus, The Rare Art Traditions, a universal history of art collecting, published in 1982. Susan Mary’s achievements were, in effect, remarkable. In less than ten years, and no longer young, she had stirred up the energy and talent to build a literary career, all while maintaining one of Washington’s most important political salons.

  What was she to do with herself? She had never had much zeal for civic service or philanthropy, although out of friendship she gave some time to the foundation for abused children created by Evangeline Bruce in memory of her daughter Sasha, who had died tragically in November 1975. Stopping work altogether was inconceivable. She still felt she had not accomplished enough and wanted to continue earning money. For a while, she played with the idea of writing a mystery novel. Then Paige Rense, the dynamic editor of Architectural Digest, came up with a solution. Rense knew Susan Mary by reputation and was aware that she had an exceptional network of friends whose homes would be perfect subjects for AD. Would Mrs. Alsop be willing to accept a position as contributing editor? She would. Beginning in March 1984, her collaboration with AD lasted more than fifteen years, during which she wrote three to five articles a year, to the complete satisfaction of all involved.

  Susan Mary had little trouble adjusting to AD’s stringent quality standards. Most of the time she had the ideas for her own articles, although she was occasionally sent on assignment. Each story required two photo shoots, the first a simple scouting mission and the second the definitive spread. Once the photographs were taken, she would do a tape-recorded interview. She had an excellent assistant, Jan Wentworth, who had worked for Walter Lippman and would soon enter Susan Mary’s circle of close friends. Sometimes the interviews were conducted over the telephone, but Susan Mary also had the pleasure of going to Albi in 1986 to visit the former house of Toulouse-Lautrec and to Paris to see the rooms at the Travellers Club where Duff Cooper and Bill Patten had so often let loose and tippled, far from the prying eyes of women. Many doors opened: the Auchincloss family in New York, Teresa Heinz in Idaho, Lady Bird Johnson on her Texas ranch, Kay Graham in her Georgetown mansion, Ethel Kennedy in her office, former French first lady Claude Pompidou, and Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. When she did an article on Blair House in Washington, where presidential guests stay, Reagan’s chief of protocol, Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, thanked her in a kind note, calling her “a marvelous writer and a delicious friend.”30 From Riyadh to Moscow, Susan Mary’s new job allowed her to discover new places and meet new people—it was interesting and respectable work, and it even paid well.

  She wrote in the upstairs office of her Georgetown house after a light breakfast of an egg and a few pieces of toast, or an omelet at most. Faithful friends would come for tea in the afternoon. These included Lucy Moorhead, Liz Stevens, her niece Teeny Zimmermann, and new additions Patsy Preston and Susan Brinkley. There were young men too—gifted young men always. She chatted about books with Roger Pasquier, and found Trevor Potter and John Irelan quite charming. There was also writer Leon Wieseltier, to whom she told the story of going to France in 1934 and meeting Edith Wharton. “A plump, elderly lady who seemed to me more upholstered than dressed with several scarves wound around a rather heavy, shapeless suit.”31 Far from home, Wharton was hungry for New York gossip, and young Susan Mary, who had hoped to hear illuminating talk of Proust and Bourget, soon grew bored. Now she was the one people doted on reverently. Oh, well. At least she had kept her figure. In Vidal-Quadras’s portrait of her from 1985, she was still pretty and fetching, her shapely legs in fishnet stockings.32 Her memories of visiting Wharton’s home, Pavillon Colombe, served as the introduction to a collection of Wharton’s short stories.

  In the evening, Susan Mary continued to entertain or go out. When she and Joe were invited to the same party, she would pick him up in the little Honda that she drove dangerously fast. They talked on the telephone twice a day. Sometimes they would walk around Georgetown and look at familiar houses whose prices had become hair-raising. People would see them together, she in a hat, Joe stooping, leaning on a cane and touching the poles of the streetlights as he passed. “You are the wittiest and most diverting man alive,” she wrote to him. “Washington would be a desert as far as I’m concerned if you weren’t there.”33

  Susan Mary watched her grandchildren grow up with a pleasure that felt more natural than when Bill and Anne had been young. Anne’s daughters, Katie and Molly Crile, sent her letters that she treasured, and on the Patten side of the family, she eagerly awaited visits from her grandson, Sam, who was already becoming interested in politics; from her granddaughter Eliza, who had her grandmother’s eyes; and from the youngest, Sybil, to whom she wrote from Paris in September 1988, “I am so happy I may never leave Paris, except I want to see you.”34 Although they asked nothing of her, Susan Mary was always ready to pull strings and offer help. They told her about their studies and plans for life far more than their own parents had ever dared to do. At the time, always afraid to disappoint, Anne and Bill would gladly have traded their mother’s high hopes for a few hugs. But Susan Mary, regrettably perhaps, had thought that ambition for her children was the best token of her affection.

  In the summer, all three generations would get together at Blueberry Ledge in Maine. Joe, whom the children called Grandfather, often came along, as well as friends like David Sulzberger and Guido Goldman. Susan Mary would take the children to swim or play tennis, walking through the forest to Jordan Pond. In the evening, particularly when Marietta Tree was there, they would change for dinner. “Perhaps you’d like to go and brush your hair, Eliza?” Susan Mary would say casually, disguising her order as a useful suggestion. Although legally speaking she was no longer married to Joe, Anne had divorced and married John Milliken, and Bill and Kate had separated at the beginning of 1987, Susan Mary still referred to these times as family vacations, the sort of vacations she had never known as a child. When nobody was watching, she would pour herself another vodka and raise her glass in a silent toast.

  X

  And Night Came

  Adieux

  Susan Mary’s affection for the irascible Joe was returned, and he never missed an opportunity to pay homage to the woman he no longer lived with. “We are closer to one another than most married couples I know,” he wrote in the conclusion to his memoirs, adding, “And so the story, which still continues, has a happy ending.”1 Shortly after this declaration, their story came to an end. Joe had been suffering from lung cancer for two years when he died at home on August 28, 1989, watched over by his sister-in-law Tish and his faithful Italian caretaker, Gemma Pozza. Susan Mary was deeply affected, for they had been happy together as friends.

  There was no question, however, of putting her sadness on display or slowing the rhythm of her activities. In the fall, she went to London to visit Henry Catto, who had just been appointed as American ambassador. Since Mrs. Catto was scheduled to visit the United States at the same time, a British newspaper published a photograph of Susan Mary with the headline AUNT SUE MARCHES IN AS HEIRESS FLIES OUT. In May 1990, Aunt Sue co-presided over a fund-raising event for the Sasha Bruce Foundation. The previous year, she had given the foundation some of her finest evening gowns for a chari
ty auction, including a black sheath dress by Balmain that she had worn when Jackie Kennedy met General de Gaulle in the Élysée Palace on May 31, 1961. At Paige Rense’s request, Susan Mary was put in charge of welcoming a group of interior decorators scheduled to give conferences at the Smithsonian Institution. They were thrilled to be invited to Mrs. Alsop’s house and she enjoyed their company. “It is so odd to have sixteen people for dinner in Washington and nothing more serious than silk fringe mentioned. But it’s a billion dollar industry and so its leaders are bright men and women.”2 Still, she remained more interested by current events, which included the “incredible”3 happenings in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, followed by the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War ordered by President Bush, a man she had not, until then, thought of as made of presidential stuff. She continued to be seen about town, refusing to admit that her strength might be starting to wane. At the beginning of 1991, during a holiday spent in Connecticut with her daughter’s in-laws during which everybody, including her four granddaughters, caught the flu, she admitted to Cy Sulzberger, “I feel a hundred and fifty years old.”4 The year would soon bring another terrible blow.

  At the age of only seventy-four, still active, admired, and full of life, Marietta Tree had been battling cancer for months. As she wanted to see the pine forests and the ocean one last time, she came to Blueberry Ledge at the end of June. Her extreme frailty made the short stay difficult. In the following weeks, Susan Mary called her in New York every day to hear the ever-worsening news, and spoke constantly of Marietta’s condition to her friends Louise and Anne de Rougemont, who had come to stay in Maine during their summer holiday. On August 15, 1991, Marietta’s battle ended. Grief stricken, Susan Mary managed to speak at the funeral service at Saint Thomas’s in New York. “You are the complete companion of my life,” she had written to her friend ten years earlier.5 As long as Marietta was there, Susan Mary had been able to face life’s hardships and to keep secrets. She had felt someone was holding her hand, giving her the safety she had known as a child until the Jays left Argentina, never again to celebrate Christmas as a family. Now, with her buttress gone, solitude would roam freely through her life.

  The Confession

  She kept up appearances. She continued to work for Architectural Digest and was constantly receiving visitors, as a revered yet accessible monument, “a cross between Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Betty Boop,”6 one of her admirers used to say. An entire chapter in a little guide to Washington was dedicated to her, and she was featured in an article on Georgetown in Town and Country wearing a hat, an umbrella resting jauntily on her shoulder as if it were an accessory and not an ersatz cane.

  When Maureen Dowd came for an interview, expecting to listen respectfully to a flow of memories, she found herself, to her surprise, caught up in an energetic discussion of Hillary Clinton’s plans to reform health care.

  “There’s nothing sentimental about that woman. She’s very impressive,” declared Susan Mary admiringly.

  “You’ve known everyone. Haven’t you met the Clintons yet?”

  “My dear girl, you’re making me a glamour girl and I’m just an old lady.”7

  Her house remained a rallying point for English visitors to the American capital, such as writer Artemis Cooper, Duff’s granddaughter, and her husband, historian Antony Beevor, or Princess Michael of Kent, for whom Susan Mary gave a dinner party to which Colin Powell was also invited. When she went to visit the diplomat Avis Bohlen in Paris, it was as though she were back in the old days, making the rounds of the couturiers and being feted by all her friends. People remarked on her elegance when she gave a black-tie party in June 1993 to celebrate the college graduation of her grandson, Sam. Three years later, Sam was stabbed trying to protect his grandmother from a mugger in the street. He emerged relatively unscathed from the event, and Susan Mary, who had kept her cool throughout, praised him for behaving like a Secret Service agent. Wearing a pomegranate silk dress with feathers in her hair and pearls in her ears, she was the belle of the ball organized by charming Pie Friendly for the centennial of the Washington Historical Society. While refusing the label, she kept up her reputation as “fashion doyenne” to the point of wearing gowns that were so fitted she could not remove them without assistance. One evening after dinner, Susan Mary pressed a friend to stay for a drink, then slipped away into the next room with the maid. There was a sound of rustling fabric, and Susan Mary returned, smiling, wearing a slightly different black dress.

  “I revel in the thought of old age, think of all the time to read Trevelyan and Toynbee and Balzac and hot water bottles and one’s happy life to look back on,” thirty-three-year-old Susan Mary had once told Duff.8 What would she have said forty years later? Hot water bottles were, of course, available, but reading was increasingly difficult and memories were often painful. Scotch or vodka became necessary to make it through the day, waiting and waiting for the evening, which would hopefully bring company. Drink dissolved solitude, regrets faded into peaceful nostalgia, the end drifted further away.

  The effects of this self-medication might have been less noticeable on a sturdier frame, but Susan Mary was extremely thin and hardly ate at all. Gemma, who had been looking after her since Joe’s death, often had to call Bill or one of the grandchildren who happened to be at home to come and put a teetering Susan Mary to bed, the same Susan Mary with whom, earlier that afternoon, they had gone shopping or discussed the Maine Republicans’ chances of keeping their seat in Congress. Distressing though it was, her family had to admit that sometimes their energetic, dignified, and exemplary grandmother had trouble remaining upright. There were multiple incidents during the summer of 1995—fainting and falls that often ended at the Mount Desert Island Hospital. Susan Mary would promise to try to control herself, but her children decided that goodwill alone was not enough and that they had to help their mother overcome her bad habits. There was a plan to move her to Utah to be closer to Anne, but it was not a good idea for her granddaughters to see her in such a condition. In short, something had to be done.

  One October morning in 1995, Susan Mary was driven to a hotel room near Connecticut Avenue where her two children, her granddaughter Eliza, her assistant, Jan Wentworth, three of her closest friends—Polly Fritchey, Nancy Pierrepont, and Charlie Whitehouse—and a counselor from an alcohol treatment center were waiting. Each of them told her why she needed to get help—out of respect for those who loved her, and for herself. Poor Susan Mary thanked them all politely.

  “There’s a room reserved for you at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Minnesota,” the counselor gently explained.

  “When do I have to go?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid I’m not available this afternoon. I’m expecting people from AD.” She flipped through her planner. “What about May?”

  But she hated scenes and had to admit defeat. That same afternoon, Bill took the plane with his mother and accompanied her to Saint Mary’s. Susan Mary saw the treatment as a trap from which she had to escape as soon as possible. For her family, it was a necessary step toward what they hoped might be a cure.

  The treatment involved family therapy sessions. On October 31, 1995, during a meeting with Bill, Anne, John Milliken, and one of the hospital’s counselors, Susan Mary began telling about Duff’s death and Diana’s courage in its aftermath. Bill did not understand the point of the story that the rest of the group seemed to be following expectantly. Then the therapist made a sign and Susan Mary, as though on cue, announced in an almost detached tone, “Oh, yes, of course, and he’s your father.”

  Bill burst into tears and left the room.

  In uttering that sentence, Susan Mary was obeying orders. Her daughter, who had known for a long time the identity of Bill’s real father, and the staff of Saint Mary’s had insisted that she reveal what she had kept hidden for so long. Perhaps the confession was also her way of taking revenge for the treatment she was forced into, an undignified and quite
useless ordeal, as she saw it. Perhaps she was unburdening herself. Or she may have thought that Bill, now forty-seven, was entitled to know the truth. It is hard to say whether she was speaking for her own sake, for her son’s, or simply because she was made to. She never brought the matter up again and may have regretted speaking at all; but at the time, she must have felt an angry satisfaction at having caused chaos, a fitting epilogue to the unpleasant and embarrassing weeks she had undergone.

  Shortly after the revelation, the burden of which was now Bill’s alone, Susan Mary left the hospital.

  The Summer of 2004

  The stay at Saint Mary’s was beneficial for a few years, then Susan Mary slowly returned to the comfort of alcohol, with all its inevitable consequences. The vain and tiresome struggle began anew between two children trying to protect their mother from herself and an aging woman who refused to accept the diagnosis and the treatment it entailed. She intended to continue living her life as always. Susan Mary was from a different generation born well before World War II that drank hard liquor like orange juice, inhaled smoke, and crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners. Gemma had returned to Italy, and sometimes the Philippine servants who had replaced her had their hands full. Panicked, they would call the hospital and Susan Mary would be whisked to the emergency room. “Let’s get out of here,” she once told Jan Wentworth, who had come to visit her.