When the senator announced to the staff that he was going to make a run for the White House, we were ecstatic. We would all rise with him. But more than that, we believed in him, though by then I'd learned that heroes have a few warts. We all knew he'd had an affair with one of the assistants, whom he later placed in the office of the senior senator. And one night when I went back to the office late to retrieve some papers, I saw him emerge from the inner office with a disheveled female reporter. His face was flushed and glistening with a film of sweat. They were both giggling, until they spotted me and hurriedly donned their coats, the senator wishing me a curt good night.
Neat, housewifely Doreen had come to the office for the announcement. She smiled and hugged us, seeming more like the candidate's spinsterish sister than his wife. I couldn't help wondering what the campaign really meant to her. Bad enough to be the wife of a senator. But maybe he was a victim, too, married early to a woman he'd soon outgrown. She must have looked much different to an orphan at the state university than to a rising U.S. senator. After she left, several of us overheard Joe Cleary lecturing him from inside his office. “Goddamn it, you've got to keep it in your pants, or you're going to fuck the whole thing up,” he roared. I couldn't make out the senator's response. Cleary was a tough old Boston politico who'd worked for Kennedy and alongside Castleton since his congressional days. Shambling red-faced out of the office, he turned to me and asked if I knew the three b's. “The three whats?” I said, looking up at the craters and exploded veins on his broad, florid nose. I was afraid of him, of his caustic whiskey breath with its whiff of decomposition and corruption. He seemed to me the antithesis of the new political order we were trying to create. “Broads, bribes and boys,” he said, then ran his sleeve under his nose. “Sooner or later …” Cleary shook his head and left the office, the sentence unfinished. I was glad to see him go. Although I might have concurred with the sentiment, it seemed out of place on this special day, the dawn of an era. I was full of liberal indignation at his crude and chauvinistic term for women, a word I'd certainly never heard on the senator's lips.
“What about booze?” Trey said from the next desk over, and we all had a good laugh.
I volunteered for the campaign staff. Within days I was on the plane with him to Iowa. Those first few months we were romantic underdogs, tilting at grain silos and cooling towers, drawing on a modest fund of skeptical goodwill. But the senator was charismatic, and if we could get five hundred people in a room, four hundred of them walked out believing. More often, though, it was forty. On one occasion four citizens came to hear him speak at a public library, one of them a reporter from the local weekly. But he reached out to those four as if they were convention delegates, turning his chair around backward and sitting among them, lingering to chat with the blue-haired librarian, who blushed and fussed with her hair as though sensing her womanhood for the first time in a decade. And the way I looked at it, that was five more in our column. Late at night, awash in lasagna indigestion and Trey's snoring from the next twin bed in the Ramada or the Holiday Inn, I would add them up in my head like a good little accountant—the number of mouths at the church supper, the number of hands shaken outside the factory gate. And one more late convert—the eceptionist who'd gone off duty at eleven and joined the senator in his room.
His close second-place finish in New Hampshire was interpreted as a win, given the large field and his last-minute gains against the polls. Suddenly money was pouring in, and the camp followers flocked: pollsters, consultants, volunteers, fund-raisers, local brokers, party leaders, single-issue nuts, social-climbing hostesses, reporters—and women. That was when it began to get out of control.
From New Hampshire, we flew straight to New York City, where they were waiting to shower Castleton with money and attention. That was where Carl Furst signed on, the most sought-after of Democratic political consultants, a red-faced left-wing assassin. He'd worked with the better-funded front-runner early on, but we'd been hearing he was unhappy with his candidate, and after New Hampshire, no dummy, he joined us. There were mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it was good for the team, like signing a great pitcher. But some of us, particularly Trey, who had been practically running the campaign up to this point, resented this fair-weather friend, this bullet-headed mercenary. Since Furst would be stepping in at the top, everyone moved down a notch. And, in fact, the senator quickly became more and more isolated from those of us who'd started out with him, cocooned in the smoky scrum of Furst and his pollsters and spin doctors.
The night before the Furst meeting, we went to a Park Avenue party given by a fat man who owned a chain of stores and whose thin wife was a former lover of JFK. If you're wondering how I know this, they told us. That was my introduction to New York—a city I thought should be gerrymandered right out of the republic and bequeathed to France, or maybe Turkey. At any rate, I was part of the advance team, arriving at the apartment with Trey Davis and two Secret Service men. Our host and hostess greeted us with the special consideration that our association with the newly important senator conferred. They eagerly greeted Trey by name, reminding him that their son had been at Buckley with him, though he seemed distinctly cool about this. Giving us the tour, they pointed out the more prominent paintings, which were framed in gilt and had little museum plaques to identify the artist. Our host explained that he'd been a major supporter of the Democratic Party for years. “And Evie was JFK's lover when she was at Vassar,” he said, nodding toward his wife—who was adjusting the lilies in a large crystal vase—and beaming as if he'd just commended her cooking or business acumen. I thought this was bizarre enough with his wife out of earshot, but later, with his arm around the tanned and beaming Evie, he repeated it to the senator. If she'd been any younger or prettier, I'm sure he would've been very keen on this admission.
That party was the beginning of the showbiz phase. Several movie stars were on hand; apparently, some of them lived in New York, though I can't imagine why. The writer Norman Mailer arrived with his beautiful new red-haired wife. As with most of the women in the room, she was much taller than her companion. Dressed like a banker, Mailer rocked back on his heels when he listened and jabbed his finger into Castleton's chest when he talked, while his wife smiled impishly. The senator was enamored. He kidded with Mailer as if they'd known each other for years, and flirted with Mrs. Mailer. It was hard to say which one he was more interested in, and it was the first time I'd seen him starstruck. Doreen was at the party, but, like most political wives, she had the gift for receding into the background, and after posing for photos, she left early to catch the last shuttle back to be with the kids.
I stood in the corner and watched the rich people. You could tell they were rich not only because of how they dressed but also because it cost a thousand dollars a couple to shake the senator's hand and exchange a few words. But since he was gifted at making that kind of encounter seem meaningful, I doubt anyone went away feeling cheated. Before he left, he did his best to make sure everyone in the room loved him. Yet, listening to his remarks, for the first time I heard in his voice the third-person self-consciousness of a politician addressing the masses. What he said wasn't new; I'd heard many of the same remarks a hundred times before, but each time he'd seemed to be speaking his mind and his heart directly, to individuals, no matter how large the group. This was one of his talents, that he didn't sound like a pol. Now, suddenly, he seemed insincere, as if his recent success had made him conscious of these sentiments as a winning formula. The phrase “what the American people want” was repeated a little too often for my taste.
That first night in New York, he started the liaison with Amanda Greer, which we all read about years later. Against everyone's advice, he accompanied her to a nightclub. Trey and I tagged along in our Town Car, trailing the actress's limo. Trey was furious. He explained that there were photographers outside these places and sometimes inside, that drugs were consumed openly on the premises; under normal circumstances,
it was his kind of scene, but we could kiss the nomination good-bye if anyone got a good shot of the senator with his tongue in this actress's ear.
He jumped out of the car at a stoplight and ran over to the limo, rapping on the smoked window until it finally slid down. After a heated exchange, he finally negotiated a compromise. “Look,” Trey said after he ran back to the car. “You go take her in the front door of the club. I'll sneak our hero in the side door—I know the owner—and we'll meet you in the VIP room.” The senator emerged from the limo and jogged to our car, grinning sheepishly as I passed. In a daze, I walked to the limo and climbed in.
She was curled in the corner of the seat, her legs folded up beneath her. Regarding me quizzically, she appeared ready to burst into laughter. Tiny as she was, she had an enormous specific gravity; I could sense the car listing toward her side like a boat beneath us. She was more real than anyone I'd ever seen, her hair redder, her eyes bluer than anything in nature. Despite the unexpected wrinkles around her eyes, or maybe because of them, I thought nobody could be more beautiful. I imagined that others, those who worshiped her from the movies, would be surprised by the wrinkles, whereas I could look beyond them. She was smoking a cigarette, and when she spoke, her voice was husky and low.
“Wouldn't we like to play Mrs. Robinson to you,” she said. She unfolded her legs and leaned forward to pour more Champagne in her glass. She seemed a little worse for wear, her words semislurred. All I wanted to do was to protect her from herself, and from all the people who wanted something from her. As we glided above the rutted streets of New York, she talked to me like an old friend and asked where I was from. I was astonished to learn she'd been born and raised on a farm not fifty miles from my home. She told me about her family, about leaving at seventeen to come to the city and study acting. When we disembarked in front of the club, she took my arm as the flashbulbs began to pop. There were perhaps a hundred people waiting outside, but right away a path opened up for us. I heard her name repeated like a mantra. Someone asked, “Who's the guy?” And at that moment I felt the envy of strangers and almost believed I deserved it. Whatever the circumstances, I had become part of her world.
I was bereft when, at the door to the VIP room, I got separated from her by the ponytailed bouncer. Seeing her disappear inside, I was furious beyond reason, as if I'd been deprived of my rightful place by her side. I insisted that I was with her, to no avail.
I can't say what the VIP room was like, but what I saw in the bathroom and out on the dance floor gave me nightmares for days. After exploring the premises, I was waiting sullenly outside the door, when suddenly Castleton appeared, looking out into the crowd. Seeing me, he waved me in and the now-diplomatic bouncer stood aside. I glared at him indignantly. Then the senator put his arm on my shoulder and said, “I want you to take Amanda to her hotel suite and wait for me there. Don't let her out of your sight. And wait for me.” Looking around the small, smoky room, I spotted her gliding toward us, a cigarette in one hand and a Champagne glass in the other, the eyes of the crowd tracking her as if attached by wires. Even in her cups she maintained a kind of dignity, her liquidity contained in a graceful vessel. “If it isn't my old friend Benjamin Brad-dock. My young friend. My new true-blue baby boy.”
“Cal's going to take you home,” the senator said.
“Home is where the hat is,” she said, “and I don't wear hats. I don't wear hearts, either, except on my sleeve. Home is where you can't go again. It's in foreclosure.” She kissed him on the cheek, then held her hand to her mouth in mock chagrin, looking around to see if the gesture had been noted. Then she took my arm and marched me out of the room, down the stairs and across the dance floor. If she had seemed tipsy, her stride was now quick and purposeful, a practiced gait that blurred her passage and left bystanders doing double takes, a just-short-of-running gait—like the rack of a Tennessee walking horse—which is unique to famous people who want to move between two points without getting dragged into contact with the spectating class. The senator resorts to it on occasion, when rushing for planes, though usually he's a glutton for handshaking, chats and photo ops.
She raced me out the side door, around the crowd. Her driver, spotting her, jumped out to open the door as a photographer snapped her picture. Suddenly she put her arm around me and posed, laying her head on my shoulder, then kissing my neck. Two other photographers materialized and someone shouted, “What's his name?” My vision was bleached out by the flashbulbs, and then we were in the limo, pulling away.
Laughing, she said, “I like to think about the photo editors and gossip columnists scurrying around tomorrow while I'm still asleep, trying to figure out who you are so they can run the picture. And the funny thing is, they'll never be able to figure it out.”
My exhilaration vanished as I realized what she was saying—that in her world I didn't exist. She must have seen this, because the next moment she took my hand and said, “I didn't mean it like that. It's just so awful if you take it too seriously. Sometimes I want to drop my skirt and moon the silly bastards. But you are awfully cute.” She leaned forward and kissed me, caressing my lips with her tongue. I had never been kissed like that. When she drew away and reached for a glass, I wondered what to tell the senator. She poured herself another drink. I saw myself rescuing Amanda Greer from this life of liquor and limousines and nightclubs and false adulation. I would take this fallen angel back home and plant her in the rich black soil of the heartland, buy a farm and raise children. I would run for Congress, and she'd campaign for me. I didn't see the contradiction between this vision and all the glamour that had dazzled me in the first place.
“The thing about fame,” she said, “is you think everyone will love you, that it's a way to become close to people.” She stopped and took a sip of her drink, and just when I'd decided she'd lost her thread of thought, she continued. “And then, when you are famous, it drives a wedge between you and the rest of the world. A wall of glass.” She tapped the smoked glass of the window with her fingers. “I don't think your senator knows that yet.” I wanted to tell her that I understood, but she reached overhead and punched a button that flooded the rear compartment with loud music, then laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, nodding lightly in time to the music, her lipstick, I noted happily, smeared from our kiss.
At the hotel, she carried her drink in with her, and the doorman greeted her reverently. She hadn't spoken another word to me. In the elevator, I asked how long she was staying there and she looked at me as if she didn't understand the question. Then she said, “I live here.”
The suite was, to my eyes, a nest of luxury, with its pale peach floral carpet and antique furniture. It was nothing like any hotel room I'd seen on the campaign. She went to the bar and poured herself another drink, half of which she spilled on the carpet, then picked up a phone and dialed. I sat down on the edge of a sofa. She was talking to someone named Gloria. I tried to imagine the course of the night, the course of my life. Should I go to her now, hang up the phone and take her in my arms?
Then there was a knock on the door. She put her hand over the receiver and pointed to it, kissing the air between us. The senator was waiting in the hallway with a Secret Service man. Somehow, I hadn't expected him this soon. I tried to think of something to say, thinking of what had happened in the limousine, but he nodded to me and said, “Thanks,” then walked into the room, leaving his security guy in the hall. Amanda waved to him, the phone crooked in her arm. He paced around nervously, picking up a porcelain vase from a side table and flipping it over to check its provenance. When he saw me standing in the door, he looked irritated. “That'll be all, Cal,” he said.
Emboldened by what I believed was love, frightened but firm, I said, “Senator, I think you should go back to the hotel.”
He stared at me as if I'd just offered to shoot him.
“The lady's not herself,” I said, “and I don't think we want to risk any scandal at this point.”
“You l
ittle shit, how dare you—”
By now I was terrified, but I couldn't stop myself: “I would like to remind you, sir, that you're married.”
At that moment, Amanda hung up the phone. From behind, she threw her arms around him, though he was glaring at me and looking as if he might charge, like a bull, but for her restraint. Peering over his shoulder, she saw me and smiled. But there was no recognition in her glazed eyes and it was a crooked, intoxicated smile, the kind she might flash at a fan who'd managed to catch her eye. She lifted her arms and pulled his face down to her own, locking him in the same embrace that I'd enjoyed only a few minutes earlier. I kept waiting for the kiss to end, waiting for inspiration. Finally I turned and walked out, my face burning, not wanting to be standing there when they finally broke apart. Crying with rage, I walked from the Carlyle to the midtown Sheraton, hoping I would be mugged or challenged, then lay sleepless in my bed till dawn, feverish with jealousy and yearning.
Two days later, a tabloid featured a smiling picture of the senator entering the nightclub and another of the actress, but the two were not linked. I bought all the New York papers that morning, foolishly hoping that a printed picture of Amanda and me might lend some substance to my folly. Anyway, that night marked a new level of recklessness on the part of my senator. And it changed me.
I suddenly felt the drabness of my own existence. The hour I'd spent with Amanda made me yearn for something I'd never known, or even missed, before. Not exactly beauty or money or sex or power, although all of these things, I realized, might be exchangeable for this thing. I can only call it brilliance, like a surfeit of light. For a brief moment, everything in my life was more vivid. And in that moment I felt a kinship with the senator and his quest for glory. I understood how he could risk everything for a moment like the one I'd shared in the limousine. I had risked quite a bit myself. I would have liked to discuss it with him, but we were never alone together again. After that night, my career with the senator was essentially finished. He didn't fire me, but I was sent to Chicago to work with the new office there in a clearly demoted capacity.
How It Ended Page 11
