American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (10 page)

She spoke so well that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wanted more and asked her to lunch at the Senate, an invitation she playfully mentioned in a letter to Duff. “I thought that would give you a laugh, and I know it will give Bill a sleepless night. I will be prudent and precise and only exaggerate when necessary.”
¹²
In
fact, she was quite proud of the stir she was causing. One evening at Ditchley the previous year, her friend Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. had observed, “You and Marietta have certainly got around plenty since I was cutting in on you in Northeast Harbor.”
¹³
It was true. Both had really come a long way. Marietta, however, had had the help of a wealthy husband, whereas Susan Mary had relied only on herself—her intelligence, curiosity, and energy. She was not displeased with the person she had become, and rightly so. If she had kept something of the candid excitement of a Jamesian heroine, she had also, unlike Isabel Archer or Daisy Miller, survived Old Europe. She had even, modestly but undeniably, been a success.

“Write to us all, Nanny and Duff and me, we love you in that order.”
¹⁴
Bill’s appeal worried his wife. Had Duff made an incautious remark? On her return to France at the end of March, she was relieved to find that nothing had changed. Duff and Bill had seen each other regularly during her absence, as they always had. In April she set off for England, where she made a round of visits to the dukes: Portland, Rutland, and Devonshire. The latter gave her a tour of his garden, sparing not a single daffodil, showing Henry VII’s prayer book, and quivering with mock rage when two nuns (“Papists!” he shouted) wandered onto one of the park’s tree-lined paths. Derbyshire, green and gray with grazing sheep and Friesian cows, reminded her of Jane Austen. Bill had just finished treatment in a London clinic. He joined her, and together they went on a tour of Ireland that took them to Dublin, County Limerick, and Derrynane, a town on the southwest coast; surrounded by camellias and magnolias, they spent three days there, during which Susan Mary did not write to Duff.

She stayed in Senlis all summer and did nothing much the following autumn because she had been expecting a child since spring and suffered from anemia and back problems. Anne was born at the American Hospital on January 20, 1950, smiling and lovely from the start. This time, the gossips had nothing to say.

Pretty Mrs. Jungfleisch

One March evening in 1950, Bill and Susan Mary were having a martini before their guests’ arrival. Susan Mary waited for Bill to start reading the paper. She lit a cigarette, and her heart began pounding.

“I had lunch with Duff and a friend of his today at the Tour d’Argent.”

“What friend?”

“Oh, one of Duff’s partners.”

“What was he called? Annersley?”

“Probably. You know how Duff mumbles names.”

“Was he amusing?”

“No, rather deadly, we talked about the movie business.”
¹⁶

The bustle in the front hall brought the conversation to an end. It had not gone too badly.

Although Susan Mary was an expert at the polite kind of lying through omission that is part of good manners, she was clumsier when it came to outright lies. Duff was indeed chairman of the
French branch of Alexander Korda’s film production company; however, he would have never mixed business and lunch with a beautiful woman. Susan Mary and Duff had been at Lapérouse in a private room, where courtesans, testing their diamonds, had scratched their names on the mirrors like schoolchildren etching theirs on a desk with a pocketknife. Duff had a taste for the Belle Époque and loved the formality of grand restaurants and the atmosphere of the
maisons closes
, which, much to his regret, really had been closed. The combination of delights permitted by establishments like Larue, the Café de Paris, or Lapérouse suited him perfectly. “We were very happy,” he noted in his diary that day, using one of his favorite euphemisms.
¹⁷
Unfortunately, on the way out, Susan Mary ran into a friend who was coming to dinner that very evening. She preferred to mention her lunch outing rather than chance an embarrassing remark in front of Bill. “I fear that I shall never be a skilled mistress, having lunch with you is still to me a desperate adventure.”
¹⁸
Nevertheless, she took similar risks several times a month, meeting her lover in restaurants or in his apartment on the rue de Lille. A passionate letter followed every encounter, while Duff calmly noted that she was far more smitten than he was, and that he didn’t deserve her. “I love her too, very deeply and tenderly. I am not ‘in love’ with her, although there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. I owe her so much.”
¹⁹
Being in his sixties (“I hate my age”) had not slowed his appetite for seduction or his desire for women. Durably attached to his mistresses, he cheated on all of them with a complete absence of scruple and tact. His only concern seemed to be a constant search for pleasure.

Susan Mary was wise enough not to probe her lover’s true feelings too deeply or overanalyze their relationship. She knew she was loved, but she did not want to know where exactly she figured on Duff’s list. When she heard rumors about supposed mistresses that she thought were untrue, she would tease him, purposefully getting it wrong. As to other, more dangerous women, she kept silent. She was convinced of being far less glamorous than his English girlfriends, whom she imagined splendid and sophisticated. Blaming herself for having “the bourgeois mentality of the Rangoon governor’s wife,”
²⁰
she felt fortunate to have ensnared a god. Did she realize passion was on her side only? If she did, she would have deemed it fair. Beside their secret bond, she was grateful to Duff for what he brought to her life: laughter, tenderness, and, above all, privileged access to his intimate knowledge of history and literature, two spheres he belonged to. In a moment of poor judgment she even claimed, “You are a better writer than old Balzac.”
²¹
Duff guided her reading choices and they talked about them together. She may have exaggerated her ignorance, but she never feigned the joy she felt upon making it through difficult texts or discovering forgotten swaths of history.

All this reading and writing sparked off literary dreams. Her lover’s identity and the epistolary nature of their affair began to evoke illustrious parallels. She saw herself as Lady Bessborough at the side of Ambassador Granville,
²²
or as the Duchess of Dino—although, unlike Duff, Talleyrand had no mustache. These noble references peppered their correspondence with the magic of the past. Susan Mary began to pay closer attention to her style.

It was during this period that her life effectively passed from fact into fiction, but not quite in the manner she had hoped.

Although British novelist Nancy Mitford was a comic genius, she had little imagination. Her books read like her letters, and her letters resembled her conversation: brilliant, irreverent, confident, sometimes aggravating, always teasing, often to the point of cruelty. To her, serious matters were best left to bores and self-pity to chambermaids. Like Wilde, she transformed frivolity into art, and like Wodehouse, her books re-created a safe little universe that seemed untouched by the horrors of the contemporary world, a place where a lucky few cultivated wit as the highest form of civility. The milieu Mitford’s books describe was very closely modeled on that of her family and friends.

Nancy Mitford had been in love with Colonel Gaston Palewski since she had met him in London in September 1942. She followed him to Paris, although she remained married to Peter Rodd. She lived in the same neighborhood as Gaston, but not in his house. “You know our cold respectability,” he had explained, strictly forbidding her from moving into his apartment on the rue Bonaparte.
²³
Nancy’s love affair was not just with Gaston but with France in general and it would last until death. After her move to Paris, all her books were dedicated to her favorite country.
The Blessing
, published in 1951, celebrated France’s superiority over England. According to Nancy, life in France was delightful, dowagers charming, women smartly dressed, religion tolerant, the sun always shining, politics intelligent, and men irresistible skirt chasers. Gaston figured in
The Blessing
as the idealized and charming Frenchman Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a Gaullist, former member of the Resistance, collector of art and women, yet
very fond of the Englishwoman he casually marries at the beginning of the novel. This satisfying fiction made up for the disappointments and sorrows of Mitford’s real life, where Palewski remained as elusive as he was dissipated.

Susan Mary and Nancy knew each other fairly well. They met at the Coopers’, at the Pattens’, and at the lunches Nancy gave at her house on the rue Monsieur. Both shared a passion for the old, silent Paris captured by Atget, the still, private streets where foreigners rarely trod. Together, they had knocked on doors, opened gates, and, peering through windows, made out the sepia-toned light of inaccessible gardens. In the spring, they waited for the chestnut trees to bloom in ice-cream-colored shades of pink and white. After the dusty summer came the clear blue days of autumn, and later, the occasional bursts of winter light upon the gardens in the Tuileries. Paris had taken hold of their hearts.

Nancy gave Susan Mary a brief appearance in
The Blessing
under the name of Mildred Jungfleisch, a young, pretty, and earnest American woman who talks only “about conferences and vetoes and what Joe Alsop had told her when she saw him in Washington.”
²⁴
No doubt satisfied by this preliminary sketch, Nancy revived Mildred Jungfleisch in her next novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, a book inspired by the guerrilla war waged by Diana Cooper against the unfortunate Lady Harvey, whose husband had replaced Duff as British ambassador. In the book, the new ambassador’s wife is named Fanny, and her predecessor, Lady Leone. Described as the most beautiful woman in the world, Lady Leone secretly continues living in the embassy, assisted by her confidante, Mildred Jungfleisch, who sneaks in baskets of
food and helps her entertain amused Parisians who desert the embassy’s drawing rooms to line up at her door.

Mildred is described as belonging to a clan of Americans, “the Henry James type of expatriate, who live here because they can’t stick it at home.”
²⁵
The new ambassador’s wife tries to find a way to corrupt Mildred and rid herself of Lady Leone. With this task in mind, she questions one of her husband’s aides about Mildred:

“What does she like best in the world?”

“English top policy makers.”

“What, MPs and things?”

“Ministers, bankers, the Archbishop, Master of the Belvoir, editor of
The Times
and so on. She likes to think she is seeing history on the boil.”

“Well, that’s rather splendid. Surely these policy makers must be on our side? Why don’t they lure her to England—luncheon at Downing Street or a place for the big debate on Thursday?”

“I see you don’t understand the point of Mildred. They worship her at the House—they can hardly bear to have a debate at all until she’s in her place there. She’s the best audience they’ve ever had. As for luncheon at Downing Street, why, she stays there when she’s in London.”
²⁶

Although she had been cast as a blonde with a pageboy haircut, it was easy to recognize Susan Mary. Mitford’s keen eye for character had captured her friend’s devotion to Diana Cooper and taste for politics and intellectual aspirations, noting, “She puts aside certain hours every day for historical study.”
²⁷
Mitford also took aim at Susan Mary’s popularity (“it was impossible to give a dinner party in Paris without her”
²⁸
) and adaptability (“she could
produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion”
²⁹
).

Although she seemed not to have recognized her cameo appearance in
The Blessing
, Susan Mary immediately identified herself in
Don’t Tell Alfred
when the book was published in 1960. Accommodating and reasonably immune to vanity, she was nevertheless hurt to find her sentimentality and love of ideas ridiculed. Fortunately, Nancy did not know the lengths to which Susan Mary went in her desire to seem well informed. At the time, nobody realized, for example, that Susan Mary’s letters to Marietta Tree were, occasionally, directly inspired by Janet Flanner’s gin-soaked columns about Paris for the
New Yorker
. Mitford would have surely included this information with acerbic relish.

All the same, Susan Mary sent a few copies of
Don’t Ask Alfred
to her friends. In truth, compared to other examples of wicked portraiture in which Nancy often indulged, Susan Mary’s character had been gently crafted. It was almost flattering, more teasing than caricature.

The Blessing
, nevertheless, had angered Susan Mary for its open anti-Americanism. Mitford was as virulent as a band of Stalinists in her hatred of the United States, a country she judged to be blundering, uneducated, and hideously modern. In her novel, she had concocted a talkative and self-important American named Hector Dexter whose job it was to persuade the recalcitrant French to swallow the bitter medicine of the Marshall Plan. The character was so grotesque and dislikable that Mitford turned him into a Communist mole to avoid being strung up by her
American friends. Still, there was an amusing truth in the portrait.

If Susan Mary had not liked the way Nancy had portrayed her countrymen, she was even angrier when her friend told her that the conversations she had heard around the Pattens’ dinner table had helped her fine-tune horrible Dexter. Susan Mary had no illusions about her country and blamed America’s lack of interest for all things foreign. She often mocked the grandiloquent style imposed upon American journalists, regardless of the context (“lots of words like history-making, soul-stirring, breathless, and of course, hero used freely”
³⁰
). Neither did she hold back from criticizing American doings she found absurd, such as the government’s distribution of cotton togas to several elected officials in the spring of 1950, supposedly as protection against radioactivity in the event of a nuclear war. She was shocked by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt that had begun in the State Department, and by the news that General MacArthur considered using the atomic bomb against China at the end of 1950 in retaliation for its involvement in the Korean War. In spite of all this, she felt that no foreigner, let alone Nancy, who had never set foot in America, had the right to be so negative. Their friendship grew distant, but pretty Mildred, “this ghastly pedantic blue stocking bore of a Mildred Youngfleisch,”
³¹
as Susan Mary would say with a sigh, had been immortalized.