by Gore Vidal
Blaise prowled the room, unusually red of face, while the once blond hair was now the color of ashes. He was definitely stout, no longer the handsome youth that both sexes had once found desirable.
“But you got through to London.”
Blaise nodded; sat down again. “We have—or had—a special line. There was a proper row in the House of Commons. Chamberlain tried to hang on. But it wasn’t his own party that did him in, it was Labour. Labour wants Churchill to form a coalition government.”
“How pleased he must be.” Caroline had never cared for the half-American British politician who, when it seemed opportune, had no conscience about changing parties. It seemed in character that as he was currently a Conservative, he would be Labour’s first choice for prime minister. She could imagine the confusion at Westminster: the old Tories had wanted the Earl of Halifax, the new—plus Labour—wanted the colorful Winston, who had only recently been recalled from political limbo by Chamberlain to be First Lord of the Admiralty, a post that when he had held it in the World War had provided him with a wide margin—if not indeed a whole page—on which to commit all sorts of gaudy military errors. Now he had been catapulted to an even higher place. Caroline shuddered at the thought.
“Two journalists,” she announced, grimly.
“Two journalists—what?”
“Churchill and Mussolini are both professional journalists. They think in headlines. Startling phrases. Exaggerations.”
Blaise frowned. “Has neither ever worked for a living?”
Caroline was amused. “I think that what we do is very hard work. But, no. Neither has ever had a profession. Only drum-beating in the press. And politics. Much the same thing.”
“Winston’s long-winded. But he has wit. I never dealt with Mussolini. Did you, before I came aboard?”
Caroline nodded. “We picked up several of his pieces when he was editing that socialist paper in Milan. I’m afraid he has no jokes. But he did send me a novel he had written. Something about a cardinal with a mistress. Could I help him find an American publisher? He longed to be another Rafael Sabatini. Now, of course, he’s Julius Caesar.”
“By such small threads …” Blaise went to the long table beneath the window, where a tentative mockup of the next day’s front page was laid out. Churchill was the feature story. Three right-hand columns beneath a large constantly changing head. At the moment only the name floated in a sea of white.
“What about ‘Winston is Back’?” was Blaise’s contribution.
Caroline said, “Winston who? Back from what? Assume no one knows anything. The English keep track of their public figures. We don’t. You know, he’s been making money lately by writing film scripts.”
“I thought he just wrote books. Very long books. But then he’s always broke. Wonder if we can get him to …”
“Too busy. At last. But he’s doing … or was doing … something for the Korda brothers. Two Hungarians. In Hollywood. About Lord Nelson. And Lady Hamilton. The English girl who’s in Gone With the Wind.”
“Instead of Liz Whitney. Harold Griffiths keeps me informed of movie trivia whether I like it or not. What about something simple? ‘Churchill Prime Minister,’ subhead ‘Chamberlain gives way to coalition government.’ ” Blaise turned back into the room. “Have you seen the Roosevelts?”
“Not since I moved out. They are marvelously kind, in their absentminded way. People keep accumulating at the White House until the beds are all full, then Eleanor drops a hint or two and the beds empty out.”
“What’s the Wardman Park like?”
“Gloomy. I’m in the annex. The Vandenbergs are down the corridor. We meet over the kitchen fence, you might say. She is surprisingly shrewd. He’s having an affair with a Canadian woman and Hazel Vandenberg knows everything and simply smiles.”
“Grand Rapids is very like Paris in these matters.” Blaise was amused. “How do you know she knows?”
“I’ve been with the three of them. In Hazel’s kitchen. We all have our kitchens. I think Mitzi—the charmer’s name—is not what she seems.”
Blaise sat in a chair opposite Caroline. She noticed that he had developed a tremor in his left hand. “What is all this about?”
Caroline tried to look mysterious but realized that she had failed: her face was no longer the youthful pane of glass behind which she could produce so many moods—even thoughts or near-thoughts—for the mass audience that had once been hers until age had struck her down in much the same way that the executioner’s ax had taken care of Mary Queen of Scots on the screen while a giant philharmonic orchestra thundered the somewhat too folksy “Loch Lomond.”
“I’m not sure,” she said, looking out the window at Ninth Street, crowded now with traffic and, despite stern city ordinances enjoining quiet, much horn-blowing. She must speak to the composer, she thought, her mind slipping, for an instant, backward in time to Hollywood days. She realized now—decades too late—that all she had needed for the scene was a single bagpipe upon whose dying mournful note the ax would fall, transferring Emma Traxler forever from the constellation of living film stars to those of legend, radiant old light from a long-dead star.
“Can I trust you?” Caroline liked impossible questions.
“It depends on what.”
“Do you want us in the war or out?”
“Oh!” He made a snorting sound. “I’m on the fence.”
“A mugwump.”
“No. Of course I want the Allies to win. Of course, but …”
“It is the ‘but.’ Always. Isn’t it?”
They sat in silence while the various clock faces on the wall recorded different times around the world. History was rapidly moving no matter how still they sat.
“The French government—wherever it may now be—sent me here pour influencer … English!”
“To influence. I assumed that. Between you and Tim you should be … well, influential. Do you plan to influence me?”
Caroline smiled at her half brother, whom she had come to like once the fierce war over their father’s estate had ended not long after she had become, all on her own, a successful newspaper proprietor, fulfilling what had been his dream.
“I shall try, of course.…” She was demure. “But you are hardly an isolationist. It’s Franklin I try to work on.”
“The President!” Blaise laughed. “He knits socks for England. He sends them bundles.”
“I don’t think so. He is so secret.”
“Is that why he talks so much?”
“What better way to keep a secret than to talk all the time? The problem is he can never get too far ahead of popular opinion, particularly in an election year.”
“Will he run his political fixer, Farley?”
“Dear Blaise, it will be Roosevelt, again.”
Blaise stood up smartly. “You know this?”
“I don’t know anything, but I can … work things out. First, he’s the only person, he thinks, who can get us through a war. But, more important, to him at least, if he goes home to his beloved Hudson River, he’ll be dead in a month.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. Everything. While I was staying at the White House, I invited Dr. Ericson to come by, to look him over. Obviously without his knowing it. But they had a long loving handshake, while Ericson looked deep into his eyes and took his pulse and told him just how much the country needed him. Diagnosis: dangerously high blood pressure. Perhaps angina, too. Deadly fatigue as well as a possible melanoma—that black mole over his left eyebrow.”
“I shouldn’t think running for a third term was the best sort of cure.”
“It is the only cure for someone who has nothing to live for except power. In this case supreme power when the war comes.”
“Can we write this?”
“No.” Caroline was blunt. “My opinion is not a fact.”
“Dr. Ericson …”
“Won’t talk. No. This is just for us to know. You and I. B
ackground. Anyway, I’m intrigued by Mrs. Sims.”
“He just died, by the way, Mr. Sims. Only sixty. Interesting man.”
“He was in charge of the code room at the Canadian Embassy. I suspect his wife, the bewitching Mitzi, will now go back to Canada.”
“Are you some sort of secret agent?” Blaise was amused.
“I? Who have never been able to keep a secret of any kind? No. But I’m doing what I can for my country—my other country, that is. Friends in the French government thought I might be helpful, which shows how desperate they are. They want me to use my influence on the Roosevelts, as if I had any.”
“While keeping track of Arthur Vandenberg’s harem.”
“If the Republican convention were held now he’d be their candidate for president.”
“So the ladies are supposed …”
“To convert him. But Franklin thinks he’s not convertible. I’m not so sure.”
“Arthur is a professional isolationist. The worst kind. They get elected by saying they are going to punch King George in the snoot, as the Mayor of Chicago so elegantly put it.” The President was at his desk in the oval study, absently pouring a bottle of rum into a pitcher of some sort of magenta-colored fruit juice. He never remembered to measure. On the sofa by the empty fireplace, Harry Hopkins was going rapidly through a stack of newspapers. A crumpled dark suit did nothing to disguise the fact that he had become skeletal; only bright sharp eyes suggested that he was not only still alive but alert. Officially, he was the secretary of commerce and sat in the Cabinet. Actually he was, after Eleanor, the President’s other self, somewhat the worse for having had most of his cancerous stomach removed the previous summer. A principal architect of the New Deal, as the President’s largely unsuccessful plan to end the Depression was called, Hopkins was the man in the shadows, forever whispering into the President’s ear, as they experimented with programs and secretly manipulated friends and enemies. Caroline found him charming if only because he did not find her so; since she was of no immediate use to him, he was simply polite to her. In time, she would charm him. Unlike so many of the virtuous social workers that had come into the Rooseveltian orbit, Hopkins loved the rich perhaps too well, as the President sometimes teased him. He liked to visit friends in great houses on Long Island. A widower with sons and a young daughter to look after, he was thought to be on the lookout for a rich wife, but between his never-ending work as well as flesh-consuming cancer, what time that he had left on earth was devoted to the President, who was now pouring out his extraordinary cocktail for Caroline’s presumed delight.
“That should do the trick.” Roosevelt turned to Hopkins expectantly.
“You know I haven’t the stomach for it, Mr. President.” Hopkins went on reading.
“We who have so often heard the chimes at midnight together.” Roosevelt gave a theatrical sigh. “By the way, when are you planning to visit that little cheese shop on Forty-second Street?”
“Soon. I can see you are starving to death.” Hopkins put down the newspapers. “Well, it looks like the Republicans will now nominate Thomas E. Dewey, the boy prosecutor from New York.”
“He worries too much about the way he looks, or so I’m told.” Roosevelt chuckled. “He is only three feet tall, of course. With a moustache, something no successful politician has worn since Grover Cleveland.”
They spoke of other possible Republican candidates. Senators Vandenberg and Taft were duly named and dissected by the two professionals. Then other dinner guests began to fill the room, and Roosevelt, as bartender, was kept busy.
Caroline sat on the sofa beside Hopkins. He smelled of medicine.
“Have you been psychoanalyzed?” he asked.
“No. Have you?”
“Yes. Over and over again.”
“That means it doesn’t work. Or does it?”
“It’s the way that it doesn’t work that matters.” He began a soliloquy. Caroline poured her magenta cocktail into a potted azalea. Then one of the telephones on the President’s desk rang. The room was suddenly still. This was something that seldom happened after seven-fifteen p.m.
“Yes? Oh, Steve.”
Hopkins swung his legs to the floor. “Steve Early,” he said at—if not to—Caroline.
Caroline had met the press secretary; found him courtly and uninformative, as press secretaries were meant to be. The President was listening intently. No one spoke. Finally, he said, “Tell them first thing tomorrow. You’ll release our statement then.” There was a pause. “After dinner? But that will be around four in the morning over there.” The President listened; chuckled. “A night owl obviously. Anyway, express my kudos.” He hung up. The guests chattered.
“Mr. Churchill?” Caroline feared more psychoanalysis.
“Prime Minister Churchill. The President’s already spoken to him once today.”
“What will he do? About France?”
Hopkins put his feet on the President’s special metal stool. “Something dramatic. After all, as he keeps reminding the President, he is a direct descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough.”
“He’ll invade France, too?”
“Only to liberate. Unfortunately, he’s broke. England’s broke, that is. And how do we get money to them?”
“A loan?”
“The Senate will never …” He trailed off, thinking hard.
“Surely you can always buy a piece of that empire of theirs.” Caroline and Blaise had already been composing an editorial to that effect. Patriotically, she was willing to share their inspiration with the President’s gray eminence.
“Canada maybe?” For the first time Hopkins looked at her with interest.
“Well, nothing so large. So empty, most of it. Perhaps Newfoundland. Or the Bahamas.”
“Yes.” Hopkins stared at her. “Weren’t you in the movies?”
Caroline had, at last, got his attention. “Yes. But I’m now myself again. The publisher—founder of the Tribune.”
“But Blaise …”
“Co-publisher. I’ve only come back to—”
“We’ll need all the help we can get. Here’s a delicate problem. There is no way that we—this administration anyway—will let England go down. We can always handle the isolationists here at home—”
“With a third term?”
Hopkins ignored this. “With some protective camouflage for Churchill, for England. The fact is they haven’t been a great power since 1914. But we all kept pretending they were until Hitler came along. Up till then the whole thing has been a sort of bluff. That’s why we keep going on about a special relationship between the English-speaking nations, only …”
“What is the delicate situation?” Caroline had guessed.
“Disguising the fact that we are the world empire now and they are simply a client state. A bunch of offshore islands. Certainly they are close to us in many ways, but they aren’t necessary to us. To be blunt, we can survive—even thrive—without them, which is the wicked wisdom of the intelligent isolationists who are not just for America First, as they like to say in their speeches, but for Amerika über Alles.”
“I had not realized,” said Caroline, at last introduced to an entirely new thought, “that they were so … profound.”
“They aren’t. The drum-beaters aren’t. But there are a few, like crazy-as-a-fox Henry Ford, like your fellow publisher in Chicago, Colonel McCormick, like Tom Lamont, who means to find—or mold—a Republican candidate in his own image.” Hopkins stopped. The gray-yellow skin of each cheek now sported a red smudge, like rouge clumsily applied. “That’s further down the road, of course. Like next month.”
“Harry!” The President was being wheeled out from behind his desk. “Bring Caroline in to dinner, and when you’re in New York don’t forget to visit that little cheese place.”
The other guests followed the wheeled throne.
“What little cheese place?”
As Caroline helped Hopkins up, his arm felt like a b
one wrapped in flannel.
Hopkins laughed. “Well, it isn’t a cheese place, and it isn’t little, and it isn’t in Forty-second Street. But the President, like our Lord, talks in riddles and parables. It’s actually Greengrass’s delicatessen on the West Side of Manhattan, where I buy him smoked salmon and all the things that God created Eleanor to keep him from eating because he likes them. We would starve around here without Barney Greengrass, known to every real New Yorker as the Sturgeon King.”
2
Tim and his camera crew arrived at St. Paul, Minnesota, two hours late. “Air traffic” had been the vague excuse. But the skies from New York had been empty and no planes seemed ever to have used the dusty airport, where weeds grew to unusual heights and a listless wrinkled stocking hung from a flagpole, registering no wind. They were met by a small van and Gardner Cowles, who, with his brother John, published Look magazine, something of a publishing wonder and already a serious rival to Henry Luce’s Life magazine.
Tim sat in the front seat next to Cowles, who drove them through the flat dull green countryside, shimmering in damp heat.
“We expect a full house,” said Cowles. “We also got you rooms in the same hotel where he’ll be speaking.”
“This is the start, isn’t it?”
“Well, we hope it’s the start of something. It’s his first campaign speech.”
“A bit late.” The Republican convention was only six weeks away.
“Very late. But at least we got you out here before you finished your film. Our theory is that Dewey and Taft will deadlock at the convention and then he’ll be the dark horse. But even a dark horse has got to be visible before he can be the dark horse. So we’re starting him off out here. He comes from the Midwest, you know. Indiana.”
“And Wall Street,” Tim could not help but add. Ever since he had been given the card with the name Wendell L. Willkie scribbled on it, hardly a day had passed that he hadn’t read a major magazine or newspaper story about the rustic Hoosier who had been for some years president of Commonwealth and Southern, a Wall Street public utility holding company which had done battle with the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority—and lost. Plainly Willkie was now the candidate of those publishers like Henry Luce as eager for war as they were for an end to Rooseveltian socialism. But despite the best efforts of Luce and the Cowles brothers, even those who read their magazines and newspapers still had no vivid idea of who or what Willkie was.
