Daring

by Gail Sheehy

  On the run, again. We sprinted through a downpour to the rented wreck and screeched into the airport, left the car hot at the curb, and caught the next thing smoking out of Dublin for the United States. The plane pitched and tossed. Fingers kneaded rosaries. Crucifixes bobbed on trembling chests. The fear did not leave me for another year.

  AFTER FLYING HOME FROM IRELAND, I couldn’t write the story. Every time I tried to listen to the carnage captured by my tape recorder, I felt the panic rise again. After a week of my evasions, Clay erupted in frustration: “If your story isn’t in by noon, the ship is sailing without you.” He still didn’t get it. I managed to drag out a routine story. My quick Irish temper served to overpower the panic attacks, but at a great price. Outbursts at those closest to me lengthened into diatribes, driving away the very people who could have helped me confront my fears.

  As spring came, I hardly knew myself. The rootlessness that had been such joy in my early thirties, allowing me to burst the bonds of old roles, to be reckless and selfish and focused on roaming the world on assignments and then to stay up all night typing on caffeine and nicotine—all at once that didn’t work anymore. Some intruder shook me by the psyche and shouted: Take stock! Half your life has been spent. What about the part of you that wants a home and talks about a second child? Before I could answer, the intruder pointed to something else I had postponed: What about the side of you that wants to contribute to the world? Words, books, demonstrations, donations—is this enough? You have been a performer, not a full participant. And now you are thirty-four.

  To be confronted for the first time with the arithmetic of life was, quite simply, terrifying.

  SIX MONTHS LATER, I had to travel to Miami Beach for the Democratic National Convention, July 1972. Maura was safely installed with her father for the week. Clay had persuaded me to stay with him at the Jockey Club (a friend described it as a high-class brothel, where they rang a bell at 5 A.M. and everyone changed beds). I should have been filled with excitement at the chance to see and write about my first national political convention. Instead, when I found my lovebird dead, I burst into uncontrollable tears. I barely made the plane.

  Flying had always been a joy to me. It was different now. Every time I went near a plane I saw a balcony in Northern Ireland and the boy I couldn’t save. The fear of airplanes had blossomed into a phobia. I’d heard a weather report for Miami that contained the word soupy. From the safety of the entrance canopy, I called in to the pilot, “Have you had experience with instrument landings?” By now I had no shame. I asked for the aisle seat in the tail of the plane so that when we crashed, I would be the last one to see the ground.

  I began to suspect that I was cracking up. I was overwhelmed with a sense of uprootedness. Well, yes, all the ins and outs and ups and downs with Clay; I’d had four different addresses in the previous two years. I couldn’t even keep a lovebird alive. No sooner had I single-mindedly willed the 727 to clear Flushing Bay than the intruder was back: You’ve done some good work, but what does it really add up to?

  Too nervous to eat, what I didn’t know is that a combat between two opposing medications, prescribed by different doctors, had begun in my gut. One was for a lingering intestinal flu, the other for the panic attacks after the Ireland trauma. Onto the angrily separating oils and waters of that digestive system, I threw champagne and cognac.

  Clay was already at the convention commandeering his reporters. I let myself into our hotel room and decided to be mindlessly mechanical. Open the suitcase. But right there, a pair of red leather heels had bled onto a white skirt. Like the bloody socket of the boy’s eye. I slammed the case shut. Listened to the radio. “Temperature eighty degrees in beautiful Boca Raton. Don’t miss the eclipse tonight—but experts warn not to view the eclipse directly, to avoid permanent eye damage.”

  That night, I was drawn to the balcony. With morbid fascination, I monitored the eclipse. Even the planet was suspended in an unstable condition between intervening forces of the universe. Heat lightning sparked off the towers of Miami Beach. The impulse was to let go and float with it. Parts of myself buried alive with an unreconciled father, severed husband, misplaced friends and loves heaped on me in a mass of fractured visions, all mixed up with the bloody head of the boy in Ireland.

  Clay came back. I couldn’t talk. I sat through the night on that balcony in Miami, trying to get a fix on the moon.

  The next morning I called both doctors who had given me pills. I wanted a nice, neat medical explanation for the debilitating fears and mental confusion that had stricken me for the last half year, beginning with the Redpants blowback. The concept of posttraumatic stress syndrome was not yet recognized. Doctors confirmed that the two drugs (one a barbiturate, the other a mood elevator) were colliding in a violent chemical reaction. All I had to do was stay in bed for a day and wait for it to go away. But “it” was much bigger than that.

  Around 8 P.M. I snapped off the idiot box. It didn’t go off. I passed in front of the TV set and bent over to pick up a chain-link belt. A hissing sound escaped from the set. I felt current sizzling through me. The shock knocked me over. I looked back. A jellyfish of fiendish hues was spreading across the screen. Was this a drug trip or was I coming undone?

  The phone was in the other bedroom. It was beyond the window wall with its balcony hung over the water. Black water sliced by silver knives. The sliding doors were open. Wind sucked at the curtains. Suddenly, I was afraid to walk past that window wall. If I so much as went near that balcony, I would lose my balance and go over the edge. I crouched down. Crablike, I inched across the gaping room. I tried to tell myself this was ridiculous. But when I stood, my limbs went wobbly. The thought persisted, If only I can reach the right person, this nightmare will go away.

  Ireland could be explained. Real bullets had threatened my life from the outside. My fears were appropriate. Now the destructive force seemed to be inside me. I was my own event. I could not escape it. Something alien, unspeakable but undeniable, had begun to inhabit me.

  My own mortality.

  CHAPTER 17

  Kissinger and the Kitchen Wars

  “KISSINGER IS COMING TO DINNER on Saturday,” Clay announced casually. “We’ll have to expand the table to seat ten.”

  I choked on my breakfast muffin. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s henchman? How could Clay play host to such a person? He might personally find Kissinger’s politics abhorrent, but he was an editor, and editors have one criterion: Will it make a good story? Clay was also fascinated by power—who had it, how they used it, and how high-octane power brokers used one another. He knew the best way to see this dance play out was to give a great dinner party.

  This was the same interminable summer of 1972 and I would have less than a week to pull the party together. Clay told me not to worry about the dinner, his housekeeper would handle it. But I had to design the menu and choreograph the evening, and, up to then, I’d barely been able to cross the threshold of his kitchen without feeling like a trespasser. The kitchen was the domain of Angeles, Clay’s formidable Filipina housekeeper. She’d presided over Clay’s domicile before and after Pamela. Even though Clay and I had been living together for almost three years, I kept a separate office on East Forty-Ninth Street. My daughter and I made a point of avoiding Angeles at all costs. She was not about to relinquish her prime ministerial role to some young “heepie” who had turned up from the Lower East Side. On weeknights when I tried to make dinner for Clay and me, she’d shoo me out. She now stood before me in the dining room, muttering in her high-pitched voice inscrutable phrases in Tagalog.

  “Dis is a ting from hell!”

  She was wearing rubber gloves and holding her nose as she extended a baggie full of food.

  “Oh, dear. It must be the salmon from Sunday night. Let’s find the deodorizer,” I suggested with studied containment.

  “I do my way. Don’t bodder me in kitchen.”

  “Angeles, please, let’s don’t fight. This is
a very important dinner party, and I need your help. You know where everything is in this kitchen—and I don’t.” Gently, I introduced an idea suggested to me by a friend. “We can order tenderloins from the Perini Ranch in Texas. You don’t even need a steak knife, I’m told. You just breathe on them and they’ll slice themselves.”

  Angeles was not into power sharing. She wanted to do all the cooking. “Cooking and serving for ten is too much for one person, Angeles. I’ll order the tenderloins. You won’t forget to take them out of the freezer . . .”

  “You forget. I not forget.”

  “. . . five hours before the guests come,” I continued, “because they’re supposed to be served at room temperature.”

  “What you tink? I’m neen-com-poop?”

  “Of course not, but now that I’m living here, I need you to tell me how Clay likes things—like which silver and china to use.”

  “I know. I know ebrey-ting.” She turned toward her realm. “You go play with your typewriter—I work.”

  CLAY WANTED TO BUY ME A DRESS for the party. It was one of the more benign customs of male chauvinism, but I could see that he wanted to costume me as his hostess for a formal social-political dinner party. I agreed only on the condition that I pay for the dress with my own money. He made an appointment with a personal shopper at Worldly Things on Madison Avenue. Like a proud Pygmalion, he sat in an armchair while the shopper selected several long dinner dresses. I swirled out of the dressing room to show them to Clay, feeling pretty. Clay chose red, the power color. A red silk crepe with shoulder pads and a peekaboo slit at the bustline, cinched over a long wraparound skirt slit up to the knee—a costume unlike anything I had ever worn. Very Kate Hepburn. Clay’s favorite movie was Woman of the Year with Tracy and Hepburn playing journalists from different worlds who wind up marrying only when he persuades her that he doesn’t want her in the kitchen.

  As we walked down Madison, eyeing one window after another displaying women’s fashions, Clay blurted a rare admission. “Now I can’t look at any mannequin without seeing you in the clothes. You’ve besotted me!”

  I laughed at the accusation. Clay had difficulty saying “I love you.” I would settle for besotted.

  CLAY BRIEFED ME on the secret agenda of our party. He had invited Katharine Graham, owner and publisher of the Washington Post. They were close friends. Clay knew it would be valuable to his good friend Kay to feel out Kissinger on just how furious Nixon was over her 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers and what he might try to do about it.

  At that time, Kay Graham did not have a great deal of confidence in herself as a publisher, and even less confidence in herself as a woman. Little wonder. Her once larger-than-life husband, Phil Graham, had cruelly belittled her, been shamelessly unfaithful, and ultimately taken his own life in the most violently angry way, shooting himself with a .28-gauge shotgun at their Virginia country estate.

  I had never questioned Clay about the nature of his relationship with Kay. I understood that he had to court the royalty of journalism, and Mrs. Graham was becoming the queen of social Washington, entertaining presidents and prime ministers in her elegant Georgetown mansion. She obviously adored this fair-haired prince of New York publishing and often invited Clay to join her weekend house guests at the manse. She held seventeeth-century-style levees. On rising in the morning, she would have her guests shown into her boudoir where they would discuss the papers with her from a settee at the foot of her bed while servants delivered breakfast.

  I wondered, Did people sleep together at levees?

  One night, a year before, Kay had turned to Clay in a moment of crucial decision. On June 13, 1971, the New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War. No sooner had the Times published the first installment than Nixon’s attorney general ordered the paper to halt further publication under threat of criminal prosecution. This was the first attempt in American history by the federal government to restrain the publication of a newspaper.

  Kay had telephoned Clay from her home in Washington. I answered. She told me that she needed to speak to Clay urgently. When I passed the phone to Clay, he shooed me out of the room. I felt like a child being sent away because the grown-ups needed to have a serious conversation. In fairness, this was a top secret matter. Earlier, Clay had gotten wind from journalists in Washington that the Post also had the documents. He left a message for Kay: Can I help? At that moment her editors and lawyers were all frantically reading through a box full of more than four thousand pages of disorganized photocopied sheets. Her corporate attorney had warned her that the paper was vulnerable under the Espionage Act. If found guilty of a felony, the Washington Post company could be stripped of its license to operate TV stations.

  Kay was distraught. She confided to Clay that her company was about to go public and if threatened with criminal action, the underwriters could withdraw without penalty. Clay’s instincts were strongly in favor of publishing. If she held back because of government pressure, the New York Times would beat her, and the paper’s reputation could be destroyed. He told Kay he felt the soul of her newspaper was at stake. His views were echoed by her editors. She understood that if she didn’t publish, she would lose respect and loyalty on the editorial floor. Courageously, she gave the go-ahead.

  A pinch of jealousy had begun to muddy the reservoir of respect I had for this gutsy woman who was preserving her paper’s journalistic integrity against intimidation by the president and his gang. She was at the center of a national crucible. Clay was in awe of her. The Pentagon Papers showed a deep cynicism on the part of the military, and bald-faced lying by the previous president, Lyndon Johnson. Nixon knew the whole sordid history but was perpetuating the big lie as the centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

  Clay also knew that Kissinger avidly courted Graham. Her newspaper was the Rosetta stone in Washington. It was written in two languages: one for recording policy documents and boilerplate statements from politicians, and another for leaks, where the real news was couched in unsourced quotes. Kissinger took every opportunity to soften up the liberal media with such leaks. His aim was to elevate himself to the status of America’s Bismarck, the German statesman who created “balance of power” diplomacy that preserved the peace in Europe from the 1870s until World War I.

  Kay and Henry were surprisingly cozy. They sneaked off to the movies together. She gave small, off-the-record parties for him at her home. This baffled me. Kissinger had done his best to squash publication of the Pentagon Papers; Nixon despised the Post. So how could these two, on opposing sides of the Vietnam War, and pulling with all their powers in opposite directions in the political war for the hearts and minds of the American people, be such close friends?

  Power loves power.

  Clay had also invited Joseph Kraft, a high-profile Post columnist. Clay had tapped Joe to write stories for New York because he was not as easily manipulated by Kissinger as other political writers. Even when Joe outed Kissinger for his double-dealings in helping to elect Nixon in 1968, the journalist didn’t lose access. On the contrary, Kissinger was even more willing to take his calls. Joe and Clay had become great friends. On summer weekends, he and Clay and I would ride bikes to Georgica Beach and go bodysurfing. Then the two men would sit on blankets and talk Washington politics, in a shorthand I could barely decipher. This dinner party would offer Joe a golden opportunity to needle Kissinger about Nixon’s bizarre turnaround, from hiding his secret bombing of Cambodia to ballyhooing his expansion of the Vietnam War in that sovereign country as a brave new policy.

  Finally, learning that David Frost was in town, Clay asked him to join the table. Frostie had sought out Clay in the mid-1960s to help him with ideas for his first American TV show, That Was the Week That Was. The two men had a ball creating sly, British-style political satire and the kind of zany skits that live on today on Saturday Night Live. Frost had an agenda of his own; he wanted to seduce Henry Kissinger, the pr
esident’s closest confidant, into appearing on his syndicated talk show.

  I understood that Clay needed to stay close to the biggest ears in Washington, D.C. Nothing tickled him more than a dinner party that brought together masters of manipulation from the political and media worlds, hip to hip, around his table. He would start off spinning the top by tossing out a provocative question. He counted on the writers he’d invited to ask the follow-ups. Guests would grow dizzy with the velocity of views and quips and counterarguments until, in the competition to sound like the smartest one in the room, they would forget what they shouldn’t say. Clay would slip out of his breast pocket a small Hermès notepad and a gold pen and jot ideas. This is how he made certain that his magazine always stayed ten minutes ahead of history.

  DURING COCKTAIL HOUR before the dinner party, tall candles on the fireplace flickered in the convex mirror overhead. The flames reflected outward, shooting like golden stars around the room. The whole space glowed. Peonies on tall stalks spread their pink petals and added a seductive scent to the room. Clay smiled approvingly. I had set the stage well.

  One by one, guests entered from the foyer above, looked over the balcony at the elegant scene below, and made their entrance down a spiral staircase. Cheek-to-cheek kisses. Flutes of champagne. Angeles passed a platter of pâté and cheese puffs, displaying a deference that I had never seen before. I tried to follow her into the kitchen to check on the Texas tenderloins, but she stopped me at the door to her realm. “Ebrey-ting under my control.”

  I yanked up my sliding shoulder pads, feeling like a little girl playing dressup. Kissinger, in his sauerkraut mumble, introduced the subject of his recent world-shaking trip to China with Nixon. He let others fawn over his stunning feat of diplomacy. Nixon may have shaken the world by making the first presidential visit to Communist China, but who opened that door? Kissinger, of course, whose instinctive feel for power and conspiracy allowed him to play Beijing against Moscow and win the trust of another subtle statesman, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who issued the invitation to Nixon.