JEWEL THIEF
QUEENS
In “The Last Dangerous Editor,” his review of Ben’s memoir in The New Yorker in September of 1995, former Post reporter David Remnick captured Ben’s book, and Ben’s nature, as well as anybody can in so short a space—with one important exception. Sally is nowhere to be found.
Shortly after the piece was published, Remnick felt compelled to write Ben to explain what had happened. He hadn’t set out to write a full personal profile; when others alerted him to the fact that he had failed to mention Sally, he sought but had been unable to find a good place to work her in. He hoped Ben would relay to Sally that he had not purposefully excluded her from the piece, for any reason.
An item in the December issue of Esquire magazine made it quite clear that, despite Remnick’s efforts at diplomacy, Sally was insulted by the omission. “Hell hath no fury like a power blond scorned,” the magazine reported, noting that Sally was “fit to be tied” that she hadn’t been mentioned. An anonymously sourced friend of Sally’s suspected that Tina Brown, the editor of The New Yorker and a woman with whom Sally had feuded publicly in the past, had been responsible for the exclusion. Remnick tried again to defuse the situation: “I know that Sally was baffled that she wasn’t in it and said as much to some friends,” he told Esquire. “As you see it in the magazine is how I wrote it.”
“I felt bad about it,” Remnick told me when I interviewed him in his office at The New Yorker, where he is now the editor in chief, in the fall of 2009. I reminded him of his letter to Ben, in which he explained that he had tried to splice a reference to Sally into the preexisting piece, but that it hadn’t felt right to him.
“I’m a professional,” he said. “I could have gotten it in. I was wrong. I was wrong. Not that I owed it to anybody, but I was wrong. Because she is a big deal in Ben’s life, God only knows.”
That there could be this amount of wrangling over an article that neglects to mention Sally opens a small window onto the long shadow she casts. I suspected, though he didn’t admit it to me, that Remnick had concluded that the safest way to deal with Sally in his piece was not to deal with her at all—and even then he paid for it.
I first understood Sally on a sunny summer Friday afternoon in 2009. We were driving over the Key Bridge, Sally at the wheel, Ben in the passenger seat, me in back, headed to a party for Quinn and then down to Porto Bello for the weekend. Somehow the conversation drifted to Gloria Steinem.
“The problem with her was she thought she was sexy,” Ben said. “She wasn’t, but she thought she was.” Open and closed, as far as Ben was concerned.
Sally’s take was more complicated. She told a long, involved story about how at one point Steinem, the ultrafeminist, had been perceived to be throwing herself at Mort Zuckerman, the real estate magnate. Sally said that Steinem would sit captivated at Zuckerman’s feet at public events, mooning over him.
“So I wrote a piece calling her a hypocrite,” she said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. “You know, just to stir things up.”
It was a casual moment, but I knew instantly that that was Sally, that that was the real person I had just seen. The essence of Sally is that she loves to stir things up. She always does, and always has. Regard her or disregard her, it’s at your peril either way.
When Sally came through the doors of The Washington Post in 1967, she was a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Smith College who had bounced around through a variety of odd jobs, looking for a way in. She was an Army brat, Southern by birth and sensibility despite having traveled throughout the United States and Europe for much of her childhood, enduring twenty-two different schools before college. Her dad was General William Quinn, an intelligence officer during World War II who helped transform the OSS into the CIA, and later the commander of the 17th Infantry Regiment, 7th Division, in Korea, where he became known as “Buffalo Bill.” Her mother was Sara Bette Williams, born in Savannah, Georgia, a bona fide Southern belle who smoked cigarettes through a long holder and threw raucous parties before unpacking the boxes at each new house the Army moved the Quinns into. (Word on the street is that Bette had an affair with Barry Goldwater, one of the general’s best friends. She also, apparently, had a crush on Woodward. At one holiday dinner, after a series of strokes had damaged her memory, she turned to Bob and asked, matter-of-factly, “Did we fuck?”)
Sally had wanted to be an actress, but she floated around town for a while, working as a social secretary for the Algerian ambassador, among other jobs. After meeting some reporters and taking a liking to journalism, she applied for an entry-level position at the Post.
The job was to serve as the secretary to Phil Geyelin, the editorial page editor. He was smooth, urbane, slicked-back hair, familiar with cocktails. After one interview, he told her that she was hired, to start the following Monday. Then he took her to see Ben.
She’d heard of Ben, but she’d never met him before. He hooked her good. “I just remember looking at Ben and being completely dazzled,” Sally told me. Ben later revealed that after Sally left, he turned to Geyelin and said, “Phil, you can’t hire her because she’ll break up your marriage. Don’t do it.”
Geyelin called over the weekend and told Sally that she wasn’t right for the job, that she was “overqualified.” She drifted around for a few months, spending some of the summer of 1968 working for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, which turned into a role as an assistant for CBS’s coverage of the 1968 political conventions. Eventually she returned to Washington, and early in 1969, desperate to make some waves, she borrowed money from her parents and threw a huge party for her friend, the newly elected congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr. She was well connected from her work with the embassies and through her parents’ social universe, so she invited every big name she knew.
The next day, after Sally’s party made the social pages, Ben called her up himself. As she remembers it, he said, “Sally, you don’t know me, but I’m Ben Bradlee and I would like to talk to you about a job at The Washington Post. Would you be interested?” They made plans for her to come in the following morning.
“I still remember exactly what I was wearing,” she says. “I had white gloves. Ladies wore white gloves.” It was definitely not the seventies yet. “I had a little silk blue dress on and white stockings and cream-colored shoes and a cream-colored bag and white gloves. I mean, it was like the old Hepburn days.”
The Style section was still getting under way at that time, and Ben needed a new party reporter. Sally was young and smart and well connected and attractive. Would she want to give it a shot? When she said she would, Ben offered her a six-month tryout. All she needed to do was leave some of her written work behind with him for the editors to review.
“I’ve never written anything,” she told him.
When Ben mentioned this to Geyelin, Geyelin famously responded, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” (Later versions always put these words in Ben’s mouth, but both Ben and Sally insist it was Geyelin who actually said it.) She was hired.
“In those days, you took risks,” Sally told me. “You could do things that you can’t do anymore.” It was different, perhaps, from how Ward Just or Haynes Johnson or David Broder or Carl or Bob came to the paper, but it was arguably as important a moment. And what bound her to all those other people, despite their differences, was that she had come to the Post because of Ben.
Over the course of the next three years, Sally would make her name on the party beat and then move on to write profiles of Washington players large and small. The “Sally Quinn profile” became a thing in and of itself, a huge draw at the paper. She always managed to get people to say strange, quotable things, and when they did she pounced.
At a party in October of 1969, she approached Henry Kissinger, who was standing alone by himself.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him. “Don’t you like parties? Aren’t you a swinger?”
“Well,” he said, with a grin, “I’m really a secret swinger.”
She once did a series of interviews with George Wallace and his family during the Democratic primary of 1972, before Wallace was shot. Wallace’s mother-in-law, a woman named Big Ruby, described Wallace’s diminutive stature to Sally in a memorable way: “Shoooooooot, honey, he ain’t even titty high.”
All of Sally’s pieces had verve and personality. She had a particular penchant for sticking it to people she felt were social climbers, sometimes in ways that could feel catty and vindictive. But even her detractors admitted that she nailed her subjects more often than not.
In August of 1972, the Style editors decided to send Sally down to Miami to cover the Republican convention. The National desk had sent their A-team of political reporters, but Style occupied a different perch and would necessarily have its own take. When she got to the gate at the airport, she noticed that Ben was on her flight; as they took their seats, they realized that they were sitting together. They were the only two Post people on the plane.
“We fell in love with each other on the plane ride,” Sally told me. “Two hours.”
Sally is prone to dramatic statements, so I checked this with Ben. He laughed. I asked if he remembered it that way, and he said, “I sure do.”
“I wasn’t in love with him before then,” she says. “I was dazzled by him, but he was so far out of my reach, you know. He had three million children and he’s married to the legendary Antoinette Pinchot, Jack Kennedy, blah blah blah. It was just so far away … and he was twenty years older. But there we were on the plane, and it was just shazzam.” It helped that the flight was a particularly turbulent one, and as a Southern belle Sally was quite distressed by the turbulence and simply had to put her hand on Ben’s thigh to steady herself.
Ben was supposed to have dinner that night with David Brinkley and his wife, Susan, and he invited Sally to join them. But when he got to his hotel, he discovered that Howard Simons had already booked a dinner that night with the National staff. He called Sally, who was staying at a separate hotel, to tell her.
“I was so disappointed,” she says. “And I could tell he was, too.” Ben invited her to the dinner, but Howard had done the seating and she was stuck at the other end of the table. They shared a few wistful glances but never got a chance to talk.1
The next day, after Sally had left the convention floor and was hailing a taxi, she heard Ben’s distinctive voice calling for a taxi behind her. She turned, and they decided to share a cab. Ben was going back to his hotel, did she want to join him for a drink? When they arrived, Phil Geyelin was somehow standing right there, as if he’d been waiting for them. Everybody from the Post was already at the bar, he said, and Ben and Sally had to join them. The opportunity had flown. Had Geyelin not intercepted them, the outcome might likely have been different. As it was, Sally returned to her hotel alone.
“So I came back,” she told me, “madly in love with him. I had always sort of worshipped him from afar, but in this kind of untouchable way. And he, at that point, was in love with me. I mean, it happened in two hours on the plane.”
A word about Ben’s love life. It’s easy to be flip about Ben being a ladies’ man, or women always loving Ben, because most of them do and it’s not hard to see why. But even if you believe that Sally and Ben didn’t consummate until June of 1973, a year after their flirtation in Miami, even then Ben was still officially married.2
In 1995, Charlie Rose asked Ben, toward the end of their televised interview, “Any great regret?”
“Well, I wish … if I hurt Tony Bradlee, I would regret that,” Ben said. “If I hurt Jean Bradlee, I would regret that.”
“Former wives,” Rose said.
“Yeah.” Ben looks down and away, caught for a moment by an emotion. “But I still maintain very good relationships with them.” He shifts his gaze skyward for a while. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “I don’t regret much. Je ne regrette rien.” It’s a great end to the interview, and a textbook example of Ben’s attitude. He knows that he’s hurt some people, but in the grand scheme he doesn’t let it slow him down all that much.
Ben’s first wife, Jean, is a ghost to me, and seems to be so to Ben, too. Ben has said, on numerous occasions, that they barely knew each other. They got married when he was twenty, on the same August day in 1942 that he graduated from Harvard and was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy. “If I had been able or willing at that time to describe a ‘trophy wife,’ I would probably have described Jean—pretty, sure to be a good mother, fine family and all of that,” Ben writes in A Good Life. There’s something desultory about the description, even as he’s trying to be charitable. Jean was from a good family, the Saltonstalls of New England,3 and a suitable mate. But he was about to spend four years in the war.
“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know today,” Ben told me when I asked him why he married Jean. Had there been peer pressure to get married? Was that the box to check before heading off to war? He said no. A friend of theirs from the social set in Boston had already been killed overseas by the time Ben and Jean got married, and it had scared everybody Ben knew. “I would have thought that would have been enough,” he told me, “to say, ‘Why do we do this now?’ ”
In some of Ben’s letters to his parents from his destroyer in the Pacific, you can feel how much he wants to say the right thing about Jean but somehow can’t bring himself to do it in a convincing way:
August 1, 1943
[Jean] has been a marvelous correspondent telling me everything that has happened, and including all her multitudinous philosophies and beliefs, which never cease to amaze me. I think that perhaps is a side of your daughter-in-law that you do not know very well, her amazing insight into human nature and her controlled ambitions and desires for us both.
December 19, 1943
My wonderful wife has sent me the most beautiful pictures, which I suppose you have seen. I hadn’t really forgotten what she looked like, but I had forgotten she was as lovely as all that, I must confess. I am so terribly interested in her, so very confident of her potentialities, so very proud of having the privilege of fighting for her, and so very excited about the prospects of working for what I have fought for—these are all my waking thoughts.
Certainly the ardor of youth is present here, but there’s a hollowness, too. “So very confident of her potentialities” doesn’t sound like love.
Happily, there is more than just Ben’s word to go on in all of this.4 In 1949, shortly after Ben had started at the Post, a Grant Study interviewer came down to interview Ben and Jean at their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In her report, the Grant Study researcher described her first impressions of the couple in this way:
Mrs. Bradlee has blonde hair, worn in a page-boy style. She has well-proportioned features and is attractive, with nothing especially noticeable in her appearance. She is feminine but not plump. She has the style and manner of an undergraduate college girl. She was wearing [a] plain sweater with skirt, with no ornaments. Bradlee, who appeared slightly underweight, wore a brown tweed jacket and slacks. His shirt collar was open, but later before going to work, he put on a tie which he tied loosely. His hair had a crew cut and an unruly appearance, tending to stick out at different angles here and there. He had a very vigorous manner, and both he and his wife talked rapidly and easily.…
Bradlee had traveled 500 miles to vote for Truman, then he shrugged, saying, “My wife finally voted for Dewey, so we canceled each other’s vote.” He showed a little disgust and irritation.
As Ben put it with George Vaillant in 1990, “There was no risk-taking in Jean. I felt like I had to blast her out of Boston and blast her out of Manches
ter [where Ben worked on the newspaper] and blast her out of Washington and blast her to Paris. There was no sense of adventure in her at all.” Jean was a WASP and expected a standard WASP life. Ben didn’t become Ben until he’d been through the war, and when he got back he didn’t want all that anymore, if he’d ever wanted it at all.
When Ben and Jean moved to Paris in 1952, they were doomed—and in his heart, according to his Grant Study questionnaire from a few years later, Ben already knew it:
Grant Study, June 27, 1955
“As you look back on the years following World War II can you recall particular periods when you were under special pressures from your work or your life: Please specify.”
Now, when I am forced after 13 years of marriage to admit that it not only doesn’t work, but hasn’t worked for at least half of that time, when I am forced to start a new personal life.
In 1967, after Ben had been married to Tony for nearly ten years, the Grant Study questionnaire asked him to rank his happiest and his unhappiest times. “Explanatory remarks would be especially appreciated,” the authors of the survey wrote. For his unhappiest period, Ben checked the ages 27–35, the end of his first marriage. “Marriage disintegrating,” he wrote in a black marker scrawl next to his check mark. For happiest, he checked 35–42 and 42–49. Next to those checks, he wrote simply, “Rebirth.”
Ben fell in love with Tony, really truly in love. There were other women in Paris, but Tony brought out a different side in Ben right away:
B: This was a courtship. I mean, there was a question of whether she would agree to marry me.
… She really was extraordinarily vital and lots of the things that she isn’t now, or that she didn’t become. I mean my friends were just enchanted with her, would stay up all night and we’d prowl these—I really knew every joint in Paris, and I knew where the underground nightclubs were and she spoke a little French, and we traveled all over the country, to little obscure places, you know, very romantic, get picnics, go up in the fields, we’d paint.
Yours in Truth Page 26
