The General's Women
Page 36
At the time, Kearns and his wife, a British fashion model and showgirl named Gwendoline Ethel Shoring (an expat Brit whom Kay may also have known back in London) were living in an apartment on West Eightieth Street in New York and Kearns was working as a freelance writer for national magazines. He had only one month to produce the 110,000-word manuscript, because Prentice-Hall—anxious to capitalize on the publication of Eisenhower’s memoir—was rushing Kay’s book into print. The October publication of Eisenhower Was My Boss would be just one month ahead of Doubleday’s November publication of Eisenhower’s memoir, Crusade in Europe.
Kay and Kearns were paid an advance of one thousand dollars. They split the advance evenly and agreed that Kay would get 73 percent of the royalties and Kearns 27 percent. The book received strongly positive reviews from Charles Poore and David Dempsey in the New York Times and quickly shot up to the top of the charts. Within two months, some twenty-five thousand hardcover copies were in print. The book was serialized in Look magazine in October and November and excerpts appeared in over fifty newspapers. It was widely—and positively—reviewed as “the inside story of a military command from a woman’s point of view.” One advertisement promised, “You’ll enjoy the personal, human things Captain Summersby says about her boss.” Another: “Her story is a report to women—the only one of its kind to come out of World War II.” The book, with side-by-side photos of Kay and Ike, was front-page news all around the country.
Kay had sent Ike (who was just beginning to settle into his presidency at Columbia University) a prepublication copy of her book, and on September 30, 1948, he replied with a dictated thank-you note. In New York, she was staying at the Hotel Winslow at Madison Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street, but she spent the autumn and part of the spring of 1949 on the lecture circuit, speaking on college campuses and at women’s clubs, libraries, and bookstores. She also appeared on radio and on the popular quiz show Twenty Questions. In July 1949, she flew to England, where the UK edition of the book had been published by T. Werner Laurie Ltd. She visited her mother in London; they traveled through England and Scotland and visited relatives at Inish Beg.
Returning to New York on the SS America at the end of October 1949, Kay found an apartment at 155 East Forty-Ninth and her name began to appear in the New York gossip columns. She sent a Christmas note to Eisenhower, saying that she was working with a travel service and finding the work “very interesting.” Walter Winchell reported in the New York Daily Mirror (January 16, 1950) that she had “quietly” opened a “midtown travel agency.” Dorothy Kilgallen reported in the New York Journal American (May 29, 1950) that her agency was located at East Forty-Second Street. In the Los Angeles Times, Hedda Hopper (April 7, 1950) called the venture a “lecture bureau” and mentioned that Kay was visiting Hollywood.
Whatever the project, it apparently didn’t last very long, for in the fall of 1950, Kay took a job as a “vendeuse” in women’s upscale retail at Bergdorf Goodman, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where she worked for the next two years. She mentioned the “very good job” in a Christmas 1950 note to Ike; it, too, may have come through the Eisenhower connection, although if it did, she doesn’t mention this. Her letter was written just two days before Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and moved with Mamie to Paris.
Kay became an American citizen in February 1951. Late in that year, she sent a holiday card to Eisenhower, with a typed note mentioning that she would be spending Christmas in Washington with Ellen Ruthman (the WAC officer who served as Ike’s dietician and supervisor of his personal mess when he was at the Pentagon) and that she would be joining the WACs who had served on his staff during the war for their fifth annual get-together. She was also looking forward to seeing Butch and Molly, who were visiting in New York. She added “Telek continues to be in wonderful shape. He looks younger than ever.”
Eisenhower, meanwhile, had taken a two-year leave from the Columbia University presidency so that he could serve at NATO, and he and Mamie were living in a chateau outside Paris. In early 1952, he was persuaded to run for president as a Republican when he saw a remarkable promotional film created by Tex McCrary (for whom Kay worked in 1947–1948). McCrary arranged a “We Want Ike” rally in Madison Square Garden and recorded the rally on kinescope. It was designed to convince the General that there was a massive groundswell of enthusiasm for his candidacy. It did the trick. When Eisenhower saw the kinescope, he was so moved by the demonstration that he agreed to become a candidate.
Eisenhower’s path to the Republican nomination was contested by Senator Robert A. Taft. Taft’s campaign claimed to have a copy of the letter Ike had written to General George Marshall shortly after V-E Day, saying that he intended to divorce Mamie and marry Kay. There were even suspicions that Ike and Kay had not ended their relationship when he left Germany. Around this time, Harry Butcher wrote to warn Ike that a “group of businessmen” were attempting to raise $15,000 to tap Kay’s telephone and catch calls from Eisenhower. Apparently, Taft’s staffers also approached Kay, attempting to get information from her. In his Mirror column of January 30, 1952, Walter Winchell notes that Kay “jilted Taft forces attempting to ‘woo’ her.” Heading the column is a photograph of Kay in uniform, holding Telek, who was apparently a familiar sight in New York social circles. The caption reads, “No Soap for Taftites.” There is no mention of a letter, but the newspaper audience is presumed to be able to guess that Kay has some sort of secret knowledge about Ike that—if it were revealed—would derail his candidacy.
In the summer of 1952, Kay flew to London to visit her mother. As it happened, Eisenhower and Mamie were there at the same time. In Past Forgetting, Kay says that she sent a note to their suite in the Dorchester Hotel, inviting them to tea with her mother. Shortly, a young major appeared at her mother’s house, saying that he was there at General Eisenhower’s request. Over drinks, the young man said, “Kay, it’s impossible. The General is really on a tight leash. He is not his own master.”
“It was [Ike’s] way of letting me know,” Kay writes, “that I still did mean something to him.” On September 24, New York Post columnist Earl Wilson mentions that Kay has returned from England. A month later, Wilson writes that Kay Summersby’s Scottie “wears an Ike button.”
Whatever the behind-the-scenes rumors and maneuvers, the issue of Eisenhower’s relationship to Kay was not publicly aired in the 1952 presidential campaign. Eisenhower carried all but nine of the forty-eight states, and the Republicans, following the General’s flag, took both the House and the Senate. The GOP was back in power, and Eisenhower was in command of the Oval Office.
• • •
Two weeks after the election, Kay married Reginald T. H. Morgan, a partner in the New York brokerage firm of Dominick and Dominick. Kay was Morgan’s third wife. His first wife had died and he was recently (June 12, 1952) divorced from his second wife. With the marriage, Kay gained four stepchildren. They said their vows in a quiet ceremony in a friend’s home on East Seventy-Second Street. After a honeymoon at St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, they moved to New Canaan, Connecticut. Kay wrote to Ike to let him know of the marriage. In response, he wrote: “It was good to hear from you, particularly such happy tidings! Congratulations to the lucky groom, and to both of you my very best wishes for your continuing happiness.” So far as is known, it was his final letter to her.
The marriage didn’t last. “It was an unfortunate experience,” Kay said when the couple separated in 1957. She obtained an Alabama divorce on March 11, 1958. (Morgan had other marital problems, as well. His second wife was suing him for failure to pay child support for their two children.) At the time, Kay was living at 901 Lexington Avenue in New York, just three blocks from Central Park; she later moved to an apartment on Park Avenue. Through the mid-1960s, she worked as a fashion consultant for CBS Television, costuming such stars as Tallulah Bankhead, Greer Garson, and Peggy Lee. As a freelance costume designer, she worked with such shows
as Kraft Music Hall and assisted one of Hollywood’s top designers on films such as The Group and The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Her last job was as a fashion consultant for The Stepford Wives.
But while Ike might be gone from Kay’s life and her marriage had proved to be a bad idea, Telek was still her constant companion—until his death in 1959, at the age of seventeen. “Such a gallant little dog. Such a faithful, loving friend,” she writes in Past Forgetting (page 281). “From now on, there would always be something missing in my life: the spirit, the gaiety, the devotion of a small dog named Telek.” The Scottie was her last link to Ike, who died ten years later, on March 28, 1969.
In 1973, Kay was diagnosed with liver cancer. The doctors gave her six months to live. At the same time, she learned that former President Harry Truman, in Plain Speaking, had confirmed the rumor that had been going the rounds for years. According to Truman, Ike had written “a letter to General Marshall saying that he wanted to come back to the United States and divorce Mrs. Eisenhower so that he could marry this Englishwoman.” Truman’s statement was confirmed by his aide, Major General Harry Vaughan.
Stunned by the former president’s statement, Kay says that she decided to write a second memoir that would—now that the General was dead and she was dying—tell the “truth” about the affair. She began working with a ghostwriter named Sigrid Hedin. The work was partially done when Hedin was paid and released and another ghostwriter, Barbara Wyden, took over the project. The publishing house Simon and Schuster reportedly paid Kay $50,000—more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money. From this amount Kay paid Hedin $8,500 and Wyden $25,000. Wyden worked from Kay’s tapes and notes. Kay is said to have seen about 75 percent of the manuscript before she died.
Wyden came to the project with twelve years of publishing experience under her belt. She had held editorial positions at Newsweek magazine and worked as an editor at major newspapers in Chicago and San Francisco. She moved to the New York Times Magazine in 1963, then became a freelance writer in 1975. In 1980, she was described as “one of the most talented, evocative, and dependable ghosts.” She went on to work with such celebrities as Dr. Joyce Brothers, Jane Fonda, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She may have become connected to the project through her agent, Claire Smith.
However, the posthumous book that Simon and Schuster published was not the book that the first ghostwriter, Sigrid Hedin, remembered. In a 1977 interview with investigative journalist Greg Walter, she said:
Kay’s affair with Eisenhower lasted for several years, much longer than was stated in the book . . . Eisenhower was not impotent. They actually had an affair, but they didn’t really have that much time to be alone. They were living in a goldfish bowl. I think Kay probably felt she was going to marry him, you know.
Hedin also claimed, in the New York Post, that “there was a lot in the final version of Past Forgetting that is not quite correct” and that she had the “real manuscript.”
Kay died on January 20, 1975. Her brother Seamus scattered her ashes on the family gravesite outside the parish church of Rath and the Islands, a mile and a half from her childhood home where she rode bareback and sailed down the River Ilen to the Celtic Sea.
• • •
But that’s not the end of the story.
Past Forgetting was published in November 1976, nearly two years after Kay’s death. New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith, writing a few months before the publication, called it “a story that people thought would never be told about one of America’s most sacred idols,” and reported that the Literary Guild, a premier mail-order book club, had already bought it. Excerpts were to appear in Ladies Home Journal. Bantam had paid $800,000 for the paperback rights—and the book wasn’t even out yet. Smith quipped, “How’s that for according respectability to a kiss and tell about a married war hero with feet of clay?” The Bantam paperback edition, which came out in 1977, cranked up reader expectations with a hyperbolic back-cover blurb:
Here, at long last, is the true story of the passionate, moving secret love affair between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, and Kay Summersby, the beautiful English fashion model who became his driver in wartime London, his staff aide, by his side through every crisis and high-level meeting of the war—and the woman he loved. Written by Kay Summersby Morgan herself, Past Forgetting is the intimate account of a relationship that began, haltingly, in 1942, when Kay was assigned to drive the then unknown two-star general, and ended in heartbreak when Ike, victor and war hero, returned home to face a disapproving General Marshall, the adoring American public, Mrs. Eisenhower—and the possibility of becoming President of the United States.
When word got out about the book, the Eisenhowers went into action. John Eisenhower speedily arranged to have a volume of his father’s wartime letters to his mother published (by Doubleday), just three months after Past Forgetting appeared. (His mother’s letters to Ike, which may have charged the General with flirtation or even infidelity, were not available for publication and remain unavailable to this day.)
Letters to Mamie probably didn’t have the effect John Eisenhower intended. Reviewers commented that Ike’s letters were “defensive” and clearly written in response to rebuking letters from his wife. The New York Times review—which ran with photographs of Kay, Ike, and Mamie—was titled “John Eisenhower Fighting Reports His Father Had Affair during War.” As well, every review of Eisenhower’s letters included a fairly detailed reference to Past Forgetting, which John Eisenhower must have wished would be ignored, or at least quickly forgotten.
It wasn’t. The book did not garner strong reviews, and the question of Eisenhower’s impotence seemed to dominate the conversation. In The New York Times, Tom Buckley was not enthusiastic, wondering why Ike, still in “the prime of his life,” was so anxious to marry a woman with whom he was “sexually incompatible” and deploring Barbara Wyden’s feminine “rosemary and rue” style. Several reviewers found the book sensational; still others didn’t find it sensational enough.
But the project had legs. In March, 1978, it was reported that ABC Television had paid $100,000 for the movie rights to the book. Veteran Hollywood screenwriter Melville Shavelson reported the price as $250,000, “nearly a record price in television for an unpublished manuscript.” Shavelson should know, since he was the man who wrote, produced, and codirected (until he was fired) the six-hour made-for-television miniseries based on the book Ike: The War Years.
Shavelson, who devotes a full chapter to the project in his 2013 memoir, How to Succeed in Hollywood without Really Trying: P.S. You Can't!, made several attempts to consult with John and David Eisenhower on the project and (no surprise here) was firmly rebuffed. Failing to gain the Eisenhowers’ cooperation, Shavelson pursued his own investigation into the validity of Kay’s claims. One of his informants was General Omar Bradley, a close friend of Eisenhower’s during the war years. When Shavelson asked him about “Topic A,” Bradley merely said, “I once used Ike’s bathroom at his headquarters above Algiers. When I opened the medicine cabinet, I was face to face with Kay’s Kotex.” That was enough for Shavelson; he was convinced.
Through 1977 and into early 1978, Shavelson and ABC proceeded with the script production, casting, and locations. The team had already started filming when the project was abruptly halted. The Eisenhower family had sued the network to prevent the film from being made, and ABC was forced to put it on hold while the lawsuit was pending. The Eisenhowers were especially upset about the scene in which Ike (Robert Duvall) and his commanding officer General George Marshall (Dana Andrews) discuss Ike’s divorce letter. Here is how Shavelson imagined that confrontation:
INTERIOR MARSHALL’S OFFICE—MED. CLOSE—DAY
Gen. Marshall is on his feet confronting Ike, who is also standing.
MARSHALL: That was the goddamnest letter I ever read in my life, Ike! You must be out of your mind!
IKE: (quietly) I meant every word.
IKE: Not yet.
MARSHALL: Eisenhower, mention one word of what you said to me in that letter to that wonderful woman, so help me God, I’ll hound you out of the United States Army if it’s the last act of my military career!
IKE: Well, goddamn it, you go ahead and try! I’m no schoolboy; I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve given Kay my word, goddamn it, and my heart, not that I expect you to understand.
MARSHALL: I don’t understand one damn thing you’re saying. Except that you’re throwing away the most promising career in American military history.
IKE: It’s my life, I can throw it away if I want to.
MARSHALL: The hell you can. The hell it’s your life. How many thousands of men did you order to give up theirs for their country? How many boys in the 101st Airborne came back after you shook their hands?
He takes Ike by the arm, hauls him toward the window, where the Washington Monument is visible in the distance.
MARSHALL: I want you to be the next Chief of Staff. You divorce Mamie and marry that English girl, I won’t have a prayer of getting that appointment past Congress. Look out of that window. If you look real hard, that’s the White House. It may look far away now, but it’s getting closer all the time.