The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “Mrs. Roosevelt …”

  “… is not jealous. Relieved, I’d say. They get on very well, the two wives.”

  “Positively French,” said Tim, reprising Caroline.

  Caroline found it curious to be once again in such close proximity to someone with whom she had, for the most part contentedly, lived and then, for no reason other than geography, parted from. “You see, I had to go back to France,” she heard herself say.

  “I don’t think I ever asked you why you had to.” Tim was cool. “Why?”

  “Did I never tell you?”

  “If you did, I’ve forgotten.”

  As they had parted for no reason, they were now for no reason reunited, each trying to inhabit a previous self, and each quite willing to say exactly what was thought if not necessarily felt.

  “I suppose I felt, or thought,” Caroline edited herself, “that I’d come to the end with movies as I had with publishing the Tribune.”

  Tim removed the cellophane from a small thin parchment-brown cigar; he bit off the end. “Nobody gets to the end with movies. But they do get to the end of us pretty fast.” He puffed blue smoke.

  “I thought I was old then. I see now I wasn’t, really.”

  “At least not so old as you are now.”

  “Thank you. I needed that. Life is less than fair to women.”

  “I don’t need to hear that. At least not from you to me. Maybe from Emma Traxler to Melvyn Douglas. What are you doing here?”

  “I have found a book.”

  Tim looked alert. “To be filmed?”

  “No. To be published. A manuscript. It was in a box. At the chateau. The memoirs of my grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. The historian.”

  Tim nodded. “Wasn’t he the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr?”

  “The same. In 1876 he left Europe, where he lived, with his daughter Emma. She was a widow. He was a widower. They were flat broke. It was the year of the American Centennial. So he came home to write about his native land and she came looking for a husband.” Caroline wondered how much she should tell.

  “She got the husband, didn’t she? Your father, with all that money and the French chateau and all those … was it railroads?”

  “Yes. But to begin with he had a great many New England encaustic tiles. Whatever they are—or were.”

  As Caroline told Tim her story, she began, inadvertently, to start turning the narrative into a movie, aware that she was now decades too old to play her dark—the adjective always used to describe her beautiful, but dark in every sense—mother. Perhaps she could cast herself as Mrs. Astor, the sovereign of New York society. “My father wrote his impressions of the country that legendary year when the Republicans stole the presidential election from the Democrats.”

  “Political movies do even worse at the box office than baseball movies.” Tim parroted movie wisdom; yet he himself was always eager to show on the screen how people actually lived, a political action if there ever was one, and some of the time he had even attracted large audiences.

  “Mr. Capra has proven otherwise.” Caroline knew how sincerely Tim disliked Capra’s syrupy films about Washington.

  “I hope your story isn’t for him.”

  “No. It is too … dark.” That adjective was now filling up her head. “Emma got William Sanford to marry her. That part was easy. But the hard part, the dark part, was when she killed her best friend, his wife, Denise, who died giving birth to my half brother Blaise.”

  Tim whistled blue smoke; then stubbed out his cigar. “How did she kill her?”

  “Deliberately withheld information, withheld the medicine that would have saved her. By the end of his memoir, my grandfather knows the whole story. He had found out what she had done and, worse, had not done. And it killed him.”

  There was a long silence, broken finally by laughter from the oval study. “So Emma married Sanford, gave birth to you, and lived happily ever after.”

  “No. After I was born, she died of complications. There’s a dark sort of symmetry in this story. Anyway, I shall publish it, though my daughter will be shocked.”

  “What about Blaise?”

  “It’s my mother, not his. Besides, the Burrs fascinate him. My grandfather once worked in Burr’s law office. He’s done a sort of biography of him, as hero, with Jefferson and Hamilton as villains.”

  “That’s what Burr would think.”

  Caroline nodded. Actually, she had always found her ancestor far more humanly attractive than any of the other founding fathers even though there was little doubt in her mind that he had been, at times, quite mad. “Now you know why I came back.”

  “I’d hoped we could reopen the Sanford-Farrell Studio. After all these depressions and financial panics, rapes and murders and drug addictions that we have lived through, the movies are now a huge business. It takes real genius to fail—commercially that is.”

  There was a rap at the door. It was Mrs. Roosevelt. Caroline and Tim rose. “I’ll wash out the ashtray,” said Tim, dutifully going to the bathroom with the remains of his dead cigar.

  Eleanor laughed. “Don’t bother. This is an old politicians’ retirement home. People do nothing but puff cigar smoke at you, while Franklin smokes far too many cigarettes.”

  Eleanor sat down. “I’ve just come to say good night. I hope my lame ducks—as Franklin calls them—weren’t too dull for you.”

  “Fascinating, Mrs. Roosevelt. For me,” said Tim, “especially now.”

  He told her about the documentary. Caroline was surprised at how knowledgeable Eleanor was about filmmaking, but then she had spent the last dozen years in front of newsreel cameras. Eleanor thought it would be a good idea for Tim to do a series of short interviews with some of the leading interventionists. “But only the very … uh, subtle ones, if you know what I mean.”

  “I shall need a list.”

  “That’s one thing we do rather well around here. I’ll see you get one.”

  “Could I interview you?”

  “Oh, I’m far too subtle on that subject. Also, my young people really hate the idea of any sort of war with anyone and I must say they tend to influence me—up to a point—rather than the other way around. After all, they know that they will be the ones who will have to fight.” She rose. “I’ll get you your list, Mr. Farrell. Good night, Caroline.” She was gone.

  “Neither one ever says what he means and yet they both appear to be so candid, so …” Caroline tried for a new word: “Transparent.”

  “I find him pretty opaque. But then I’ve only seen him in action once, fighting off The Salad.”

  For an instant Caroline wondered if she and Tim could ever live together again. She was, of course, far too old for him, too old for any sort of sex, or so she had convinced herself. But that need not be the link or, indeed, anything at all, as she had observed in the case of the interesting, if sometimes baffling, friendship between Franklin and Eleanor. Each in a separate bedroom, and often city, yet sharing an entire nation between them while, privately, he had Missy Le Hand for an efficient selfless wife and Eleanor had, it was rumored, several lady friends, of whom a journalist named Lorena Hickok was the one that she most saw; traveled with; allowed to use a spare bed in her White House suite as well as in her getaway cottage at Hyde Park. This sort of relationship came as no surprise to Caroline, who had attended the same girls’ school as Eleanor, the creation of a distinguished lesbian named Mademoiselle Souvestre. The atmosphere of the school had been something of a hothouse where usually nipped-in-the-bud emotions blossomed and flourished, all intensely described in an unpublished novel by one of the teachers, who had given it to André Gide to read, who had then given it to Caroline, with a smile: “Your old school, I believe.” But none of this had been, or would ever be, Caroline was certain, shared with the American people, although at least one journalist, Joe Alsop, cousin to Eleanor, liked to go on and on about her Sapphic attachments, which, he claimed, included a fan-dancer from the re
cent World’s Fair.

  “Why haven’t you married?” Caroline was more to the point than she had intended. “Of course, it’s no business of mine.”

  Tim smiled his crooked smile. “Lapsed Catholics don’t make good husbands.”

  “Is that an answer?”

  “An observation. Besides, I don’t want children. Why haven’t you married again?”

  Was this her chance? “I seem to have done all that. With you. With others before.” She then erased the subject from her mind. She would continue as she was.

  “There is something going on here.” Tim changed the uncomfortable subject.

  “Here … where? The White House?”

  “Yes. And Washington. It’s about the war.”

  “Everything’s about the war now.”

  “No.” He walked over to the window; pulled aside the curtain. Mrs. Nesbitt’s patented Hyde Park dust glittered an instant in the lamplight. Across the avenue Lafayette Park looked bleak and wintry. “Who used to live here? In this room?”

  “In a hundred and thirty-nine years there have been thirty or so presidents—just about every one, I should think.” Then a memory stirred. “You know I was engaged to Del Hay.”

  “Before my time.”

  “Yes.” She was cool. “It was very long ago.” But she could not bring herself to give the date when she became engaged to Del. That would have frightened Tim. She felt unpleasantly historic. “Anyway, Del’s father was John Hay, who came to Washington with President Lincoln. He was one of two secretaries, and he told me that this was their room, and how when the President couldn’t sleep, which was often—he had terrible nightmares, like Mr. Roosevelt, who keeps dreaming that there’s a man coming in through the transom to kill him and he wakes up screaming. Anyway, Mr. Lincoln would come in here, wearing only a long nightshirt, looking like an ostrich with his long thin legs and the nightshirt bunched out in back. He would sit down and read something funny to them, to take his mind off the war.… So what do you think is going on?”

  Tim turned his director’s gaze on her, intent, impersonal. “The British are secretly getting us into their war. Yes, I know that I’ve been filming mostly isolationists so far, but they are convinced that the British secret services are busy buying up members of Congress, planting horror stories in the press, making films …” Tim started to light a cigar; thought better of it. “It’s the business about the films that convinced me. Because that’s something I know. Remember Balderston? He was at your brother’s. He’s in on it, too. He’s always been an Anglophile, which is his business, not mine. But everything he makes—or wants to make—is a celebration of gallant little England, not to mention France and all those Scarlet Pimpernels.”

  “I don’t see how poor Norma Shearer having her head chopped off by the French mob will make Americans pro-French.”

  “No. But it will make them anti-mob, anti-Bolshevik, anti-Russia.”

  Caroline reminded him of their old ambition to influence—even re-create—people.

  “This is more specific than we ever were. It’s more like what’s-his-name. Wilson’s man in Hollywood who saw to it all those anti-Hun movies were made. George Creel, his name was.” He sighed. “I wish I knew what was in the President’s head.”

  “I suspect he wishes that he knew too. He acts mostly on instinct, even impulse. Yet he takes his time. He doesn’t dare be too far ahead of the public. Yesterday when someone asked Eleanor what the President thought about the Russian invasion of Finland, she said, ‘The President doesn’t think. He decides.’ Of course, he wants to be a second Woodrow Wilson. But a successful Wilson.”

  “And go to war for England?”

  “For himself. Which will include us, of course. Then he’ll want a new League of Nations, which he will personally take charge of to make sure it doesn’t fail.”

  Tim rose. “I get the feeling that I’m in some sort of witches’ coven. Everyone is sharing secrets—big secrets—speaking in a code to which I don’t have the key.”

  “No one’s apt to give it to someone Irish, who doesn’t want us to go to war.”

  “Being Irish has nothing to do with it. Being the maker of Hometown does. I want to keep Americans home. To make improvements about the house. Who is Ernest Cuneo?”

  Caroline shrugged. “Every day I hear another one hundred unfamiliar names.”

  “He works, at times, as a lawyer for the President. He’s also working for BSC …”

  “British Security Coordination.” Caroline laughed. “Now, I said that only out of vanity. To impress you when I shouldn’t have let you know that I even know what it is.” She rose. “Yes, I am a witch, too. A kindly one. I just hope you’re not with the Germans in all this.”

  “Of course not. I think I must get to know Mr. Cuneo.”

  “He’s a friend of the newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who used to be Cissy Patterson’s son-in-law.”

  “I knew you’d know.”

  Caroline wondered if by saying far too much, she had put Tim in harm’s way. He was quite right about the gathering of the witches. All sorts of black magic was in the air, and though she was more observer than participant she had quickly realized how great the stakes were for everyone involved. The world was about to be turned upside down in a way never seen before. “One must serve oneself.” She kissed Tim on the cheek and said good night.

  Would things now become as bad as they had been when John Hay and the other one—Nicholas? Nicolay?—slept in this room, wearied with news of bloody defeats at the South, disturbed in their sleep by the cries of Abraham Lincoln, as he dreamed his terrible dreams just down the hall? Caroline took a sleeping pill to ward off the ghosts of ancient nightmares, not to mention premonitory whispers of those as yet undreamed.

  3

  “Third table on the left. I’m bald.” The voice on the telephone had a strong New York City accent. Tim entered the Mayflower’s Presidential Room, where breakfast was served to all sorts of visitors to the city as well as to important residents, doing business. At the third table to the left, a thickset half-bald man with narrow eyes was seated beside a familiar-looking thin man whose gray hair was thinning in contrast to his moustache, which bristled like that of a British colonel in a film.

  “Mr. Cuneo?” Tim approached the table. Both men stood. Cuneo introduced Tim to the moustache, which belonged to the journalist Drew Pearson, who shook Tim’s hand rather absently while giving him a very sharp look indeed; the contrast between handshake and scrutiny was oddly disconcerting.

  “I’m on my way, Mr. Farrell,” said Pearson. “Looking forward to that documentary. When are you releasing it?”

  “June, MGM says.”

  “Wish it were sooner. All hell’s going to break loose long before that.” Pearson made his wary way across the room. Tim usually read Pearson’s syndicated muck-raking political column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” co-authored with someone called Allen.

  “Sit down, Mr. Farrell.” Cuneo’s smile was amused and amusing.

  “I like Pearson.”

  “Do you? He’ll take a lot of convincing that you really do. He’s more used to being hated. Look at him dodging around that table because Senator McKellar is sitting there. Drew’s afraid he’ll get bit. And McKellar’s rabid on the subject of Drew. A lot of people are.”

  “Right-wing people, anyway.” Tim was not sure how best to play Ernest Cuneo. After three months of asking questions, he had come to think of Cuneo as somehow the center of everything; certainly he kept cropping up in the oddest places. Originally a legal adviser to Mayor La Guardia of New York, he had joined the White House as special legal counselor to the President. He was also involved, somehow, with British intelligence and the American interventionists. He was said to be close to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, also to the country’s other powerful journalist, Walter Winchell.

  “I’m Drew’s legal adviser.” Cuneo ordered chipped beef on toast; inspired by Mrs. Nesbitt’s cuisine, Tim did the same.
“ ‘Adviser’ is a safer word than ‘lawyer.’ ” Cuneo chuckled. “Drew is sued for libel about once a week, and now that he’s on radio he’s sued for slander, too. The lawsuits never stop. Luckily, he loves a fight, good Quaker that he is. I give him advice on how to win the suits. I also tend to pick up odds and ends of information that are useful to people. I saved Drew from that General … I have a block about his name. The pompous ass—you know; the chief of staff who attacked the bonus veterans …”

  “Douglas MacArthur.”

  “The same. Drew went after him. MacArthur filed suit. We discovered that he had this Eurasian mistress out in Manila. We told him we’d go public. End of suit. Was I on the list?”

  The transition was so quick that Tim almost missed it. “List?”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt’s. People to talk to. ‘Subtle’ people.” Cuneo waved to the large John Foster in the middle distance.

  “No. You weren’t.” Had Caroline talked to Cuneo? If she had, how did she know him? Through all of this Tim remained, he hoped, poker-faced. “No. You weren’t on the list. I guess you know Caroline Sanford.”

  Cuneo nodded. “I even went to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc last year. What a place!”

  “I’ve never seen it.” There were definitely two quite separate Carolines. He had known the American one intimately; had never met the French one.

  “It was a perfect day. She’d invited Léon Blum, at my request, and he arrived with André Gide. It was certainly an educational day for me. I only wish Blum were still in charge over there in France. He’s got Hitler’s number. The others don’t—or they do but they think they can handle him, which they can’t. What can I do for you, sir?”

  Tim produced his White House list of names. He read them off to Cuneo, who told him, briefly, even sharply, who was worth talking to and why. Tim made notes. The chipped beef came. The whole room now smelled of roast coffee and cigarette smoke. The steady murmur of masculine voices was like a distant thunder.

  “I’ve pretty much finished with the isolationists.”

  “Lucky you got Borah back in November. He’s dying as we speak.” Tim noted that Cuneo was never tentative. He never said “I hear that” or “They say.” He simply made flat statements. “Once he’s dead you might try to find out if he took cash from the German government. We know he did. From several sources. But we have no proof so far. No safety box full of cash. I have some leads if you’re interested.”