by Gore Vidal
“We have only the cocktail hour,” said Franklin, “before Eleanor’s young communists join us for dinner.”
That morning Caroline had heard on the radio in Blaise’s office reports from a congressional committee deeply concerned with something known as “un-American activities.” Various youth organizations had been testifying about their suspect activities. Apparently, the September pact between Germany and Russia had been a political earthquake on Capitol Hill, where the President’s New Deal, already sternly labeled communist by American conservatives, was now looking especially vulnerable. With what seemed, to Caroline, either exemplary courage or plain lack of judgment, late the previous evening Eleanor had come down from New York in order to attend the meeting of the House committee, thus demonstrating her sympathy with the young witnesses who wanted no part in old Europe’s war.
Early that morning, in a green dress, she had left for the Capitol with Caroline, who wanted to hear her testify, but Eleanor had said, “You’re better off at the Tribune, influencing Blaise. I’ll drop you off.”
As it turned out, Mrs. Roosevelt caused a sensation in the Caucus Room: First Ladies were almost never seen in the legislative halls of the republic. She had been received courteously by the congressmen, who had invited her to sit with them on their dais. Gracefully, she had said that she preferred just to sit in the back where she could keep her cold gray alert eyes upon the congressmen while projecting her patented brand of motherly solicitude for the young firebrands.
“Now she’s asked six of them to dinner.” Franklin sighed theatrically.
“Are they communists?”
“Some, I suppose. Or they think they are this week. I shall be benignly noncommittal.”
“Your greatest role.”
“Do you think so?” Franklin placed a cigarette in a holder. Caroline lit it for him. “We have some other actors here tonight. For dinner, there’s Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen Gahagan. Loyal New Dealers, I’m happy to say. She’s very political and never too shy to advise me. Now you tell me about Daladier.” The President’s love of gossip, Caroline had decided, came from the fact that as he could not move about, either literally or symbolically as president, he must pump others. Although he often acknowledged that the peripatetic Eleanor acted as his eyes and ears, he also acknowledged, privately to Caroline, that Eleanor was far too noble ever to meanly gossip, “and since you are too far away in France, all I’ve got, at the moment, is Liz Whitney. She drives over from that place of hers in Virginia and just barges in. Without an appointment. Then she asks me about all the news that was in the papers that morning, which she never reads. Patiently, I tell her. Then she rivets me with all the problems that Jock Whitney and David Selznick had in making Gone With the Wind, which is about to open at last.”
During this, a black steward had placed a tray full of bottles and glasses on the President’s desk, to which he now returned. “I think a martini will hit the spot.” The Roosevelt special. Caroline loathed gin but gamely drank the President’s astonishing concoction, whose secret ingredients were two brands of vermouth, each sweeter than the other, and a dash of absinthe to destroy the palate. As he shook the martini, he returned to Daladier, the premier of France.
“We say that he is more the Veal,” said Caroline, “than what he likes to be called, the bull of Vaucluse.”
“Yes. Bullitt says he’s scared to death of Hitler. But who else is there?”
“Léon Blum.” Caroline was particularly fond of the socialist intellectual, whose Popular Front government had been denounced in America as—what else?—communist, even by Blaise. Caroline had long since given up trying to explain the difference between communism and socialism to Americans.
The President tasted his martini. “Now that is just about right.” He poured her a glass. They toasted peace.
“I wouldn’t mind talking to Blum, face to face. Particularly now. But we’re all so cut off from each other. So far apart, geographically. So many misunderstandings. You’re back with Tim Farrell, I gather?”
“No. No. Just friends, as they say. You were going to ask him to dinner tonight.”
“If I was, I did.” Franklin laughed. “I’m not sure how much he’ll like Eleanor’s young friends.”
“But that’s exactly what he wants. He’s making a documentary. About the war. About how Americans feel about the war.”
The President moved his chair directly across from Caroline’s. He rubbed his eyes; for an instant he looked to be without energy. “I don’t envy him,” he said at last. “A film now? When anything can happen.” He shook his head. “Look at Finland. Whoever dreamed that Russia would invade them? Certainly not our State Department,” he added, with an unpleasant smile. “But then whoever dreamed they could defeat a Russian army? For the moment, anyway.” He raised the martini shaker and turned to Caroline. “Another sippy?”
At that moment two giants, Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Douglas, appeared in the doorway.
“Come in, Helen, Mel. What shall I make you?” The President was once again his airy light-hearted social self, as he prepared yet another Roosevelt special, all the while talking to the handsome Helen Douglas while her husband introduced himself to Caroline. She had never found him attractive on the screen—nose too large, lips too thin—but his voice was seductive, and he was also the only American-born movie star who had no difficulty playing high comedy, when allowed. Had he been older, he would have been a perfect leading man for Emma Traxler, the Black Pearl of—where was it her publicity had said she was from? Alsace-Lorraine?
“I grew up watching your movies,” he said; then frowned. “There I go, you weren’t making movies when I was a kid back in Georgia and you were a child in—where was it?”
“Washington, D.C. I was the child publisher of the Tribune before 1917 and Hollywood and the birth of my dreaded other self, Emma Traxler.”
“I’ve just met your brother, Blaise.”
“Did you quarrel?”
Douglas blinked his eyes; then smiled a thin-lipped smile. “Yes. How did you know?”
“He doesn’t like the Roosevelts. You do.”
“And you do?”
Caroline gave him the Emma Traxler left-three-quarter-right-eyebrow-raised close-shot look, quite aware that, with age, she must now resemble the moon’s far side if it had one. “I never said, Mr. Douglas, that Blaise liked me either.”
He laughed. “One of those families.” The room began to fill up. A pair of bureaucrats, each with a wife, had shyly entered the presence. Franklin was now jovial, as he peddled yet another Roosevelt special—rum, vermouth, and pineapple juice. He seemed to absorb energy from an audience.
“He is an actor,” said Caroline to herself, unaware that she was sharing her not particularly original insight with Douglas, who said, “Of course he is. But one who gets to write his own play.”
“His? Don’t you think Hitler and Stalin are going to get co-credits for this one?”
“Certainly not if the Screen Writers Guild arbitrates!”
Caroline changed the subject; complimented him on a film that he had just made in which, according to the press, the moody Swede, Greta Garbo, had finally laughed on screen. “That was a lot more than I ever did,” said Douglas, raising a practiced eyebrow.
“Is she so dull?” Caroline was fascinated by Garbo’s androgynous charm.
“ ‘Selfish’ is more the word.” Why, Caroline wondered, was she herself no longer young and in competition with this new generation? But Tim had now joined them and her instant of self-pity passed. Douglas moved on to join his wife, whose lips had never ceased to move since she had stationed herself beside the President.
Tim was little changed. “I’d like to work with him.” He indicated Douglas. “He shouldn’t let himself get trapped in all those drawing-room comedies, particularly as a second lead.”
“He does get Garbo at the end of Ninotchka.”
“Yes,” said Tim, “and she’s getting the boot
from Metro soon.”
Caroline was slipping more and more into her previous existence. Soon they would be discussing the grosses of films and the latest studio preview, in Bakersfield. Meanwhile, she was interested to learn that Garbo’s principal audience was European, not American, and once the war became hot the studios would no longer be able to distribute their “product” abroad and so the expensive Garbo would no longer be asked to make movies for MGM. “Anyway, she says she wants to retire. Where’s the President?”
“He’s over there.” But the President was not over there at the desk. In fact, he was nowhere in the room. An usher approached Caroline and Tim. “He is in the West Hall with Mrs. Roosevelt. They’ll be going down to dinner presently.”
Caroline explained Eleanor’s young people to Tim, who said, “I wish I could film them.”
“Tonight’s out of bounds.” As they started to the door, Tim stepped in front of a strange metal piano. “What’s that?”
“A mechanical pipe organ. A gift to the President. He told me that for his entire first term, he tried to learn to play it, but so far the thing has defeated him. I suspect he’s tone-deaf.”
“Can we talk?”
“After dinner. He goes to bed early.”
The West Hall was simply the west end of the long corridor, closed off by two ill-matching Chinese screens. The sounds of the young were clearly audible as well as the high-fluting tones of Eleanor herself.
“I think we can start down now. Let’s walk. The lift tends to get stuck.”
“It’s just like home. My home, that is. In South Boston.”
“It is,” said Caroline, “democracy.”
The dinner was reasonably chaotic. Eleanor presided at one end of the family dining table, her six young Americans to her left, Melvyn Douglas and the bureaucrats to her right. Tim had been placed next to Caroline.
The President made his entrance after everyone was seated. As an aide pushed his chair into place at the head of the table, everyone rose. He waved for them to be seated. “Lovely to have you here,” he said with a most genuine-looking smile in the direction of Eleanor’s brood.
Next to the President, Mrs. Douglas continued her conversation into his right ear while he addressed, down table, the Youth of the Nation, radical division.
“I gather you young people distinguished yourselves this morning before Mr. Dies’s Committee …”
“Only he wasn’t there,” said Eleanor.
“He knew he had met his match when he heard you were coming.”
“Hardly. Actually, I was ever so mild.”
“I’m sure the rest of you were not so mild.” The President looked at the youthful witnesses—to what? wondered Caroline. Some were, no doubt, actual communists, or had thought they were, until communist Russia and Nazi Germany had made their alliance in August and the American left had behaved like an anthill struck by lightning. Before this astonishing event, the Youth Congress had, more or less, followed the communist line, supporting the New Deal at home while supporting France and England against Hitler abroad. Now, if Blaise was to be believed, directions from Moscow were instructing the faithful to join the isolationists. Mrs. Roosevelt, as one of the guiding spirits of the Youth Congress before the infamous pact, was in a delicate position. She had already been bitterly denounced by political conservatives as well as by pro-Nazi groups like the German-American Bund. Thus far, she had sailed serenely above the tempest, but the unexpected alliance of communists and Nazis could not be so easily sailed through.
“I must say they all behaved very well.” Eleanor was maternal but, again, Caroline caught the cold alert eye even as she dripped honey; she was constantly calculating and assessing. “Why, one of them even suggested …” She turned to the scruffy boy beside her. “Tell them, John, what you proposed to the committee.”
John was not as nervous as Caroline would have been at President Roosevelt’s table for the first time. “Well, Mr. President, I proposed to the committee that a resolution be submitted to Congress for the abolition of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities.”
“What happened?” Franklin was leaning forward, elbows on the table, a characteristic gesture when he was particularly interested in what someone else was saying.
“Well, sir, the acting chairman, a gentleman from Alabama, was very polite and he said that that was my right as an American citizen, and he would let what I say go onto the record in spite of what he called my slanderous remarks.”
“I love it!” Franklin turned to Melvyn Douglas. “If I could only put a sheet over my head and hide in the back row.”
“I’m sure,” said Douglas in his most suave voice, “you would have been greeted as an honored emissary from the Ku Klux Klan.”
The conversation became general except for Mrs. Douglas, beautiful eyes flashing with intelligence and firmness of purpose, as she continued to speak into the President’s constantly moving right ear.
The food was, as always, inedible. Caroline had had a long experience of the infamous Roosevelt table, which dated back to when Eleanor had discovered that her husband was committing adultery with her social secretary, a Maryland beauty called Lucy Mercer. Eleanor had then moved like a conquering army onto a battlefield where she imposed her conditions of peace. If Franklin chose, she would grant him a divorce so that he could marry Lucy, who would then become the stepmother of their five children, and Eleanor would go her solitary way. At this point, onto the field came Franklin’s mother, the formidable Mrs. James Roosevelt, who told her son that if he went through with a divorce, she would disinherit him, which meant that he would have no money of any kind and lose forever the Hudson Valley estate at Hyde Park. Finally, no one needed to point out to him that a divorced man could not have a career in politics. “So,” Caroline murmured to Tim, “he gave up Lucy, I think.”
“You think?” As a rule, Tim disliked gossip of the who is with whom and why sort. But this was part of the history he was starting to record.
“I said think,” said Caroline, carefully drowning a heavily fried chicken croquette in a viscous sea of white cream sauce that was slowly coagulating into library paste, “because—I think—he still sees her, they say.”
“How do they know?”
“How do they always seem to know everything? Lucy married happily but apparently, every now and then, the two meet. She’s supposed to have sat in the back of a car at his first inauguration and watched it all.”
“How very romantic.”
“I think it is. Anyway, he and Eleanor lead separate lives. She’s always on the move. Even so, they are very much a team. I can’t fathom what they think of each other. There is a basket beside his bed and whenever she’s here, she fills it every night with notes, things to be done, people to see. Oh!”
Caroline had seen what she’d been longing for Tim to see: The Salad. It had materialized at the President’s end of the table. From afar, it looked to be a milky mound, studded with golden and red splotches like some rare disease. “Part of Eleanor’s revenge for Lucy has been Mrs. Nesbitt, a cook from Hyde Park, now the housekeeper who commands the kitchen where … Well, look!” Caroline gazed at the drowned but still intact chicken croquette. Tim had already eaten his.
“It wasn’t so bad. Just like Holy Cross.”
“I’m sure nothing like The Salad was ever seen at Holy Cross. It is Mrs. Nesbitt’s most belligerent creation.”
“It appears to have the stigmata, a very Holy Cross touch.”
“Watch the President.”
The black waiter had presented the huge mountain of a salad to the President’s back.
“What’s in it?” Tim had put on his glasses.
“Mostly mayonnaise from a jar, with slices of tinned pineapple, carved radishes—the ones with spongy interiors—and, sometimes, deep under the mayonnaise, there is cottage cheese decorated with maraschino cherries, to add gaiety to this Hudson Valley Staple.”
The President, aware of th
e waiter on his left, turned expectantly. When he saw The Salad his smile ceased; sadly, he shook his head, lips moving to frame: “No, thank you.”
“Now watch Eleanor,” Caroline whispered. Their hostess was watching her husband with relish. She had already got halfway through her own salad and now she was watching him grimly: would her husband take his punishment? He would not. When the waiter was obliged to move on, Eleanor simply looked more than ever resolute.
Tim was awed. “She is taking a great revenge.”
“It’s positively Greek, isn’t it? Euripides. The Furies.”
“Actually, I think I’m going to like this.” Tim helped himself generously to The Salad. Out of the corner of Caroline’s eye, she saw that Eleanor was smiling with approval: Tim was making a hit.
At the end of dinner, the President vanished and Mrs. Roosevelt and her brood retired to the oval study, the Douglases in attendance.
“I’m here,” said Caroline outside the door to the Queen’s room. “Come on in. We’re not expected to join the seminar. Eleanor has a nicely haphazard way with guests. You come and go as you please. Some have actually stayed a month or more. There are also a dozen rooms on the floor above.” They sat before an unlit fire. Rose was the predominant color in the room. “The President’s secretary lives up there above us, in a nice suite.”
“Missy Le Hand.” To Caroline’s surprise, Tim knew her name. But then he lived in America full-time and read the press, while she was now once more a foreigner.
“She’s the actual wife, at least when it comes to arranging his life, keeping the sons out of jail, running the office, telling him which angry letters not to send. She’s very wise.”
