American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (14 page)

Above all, it was painful to watch Bill suffer. He could not go long without breathing from an oxygen tank, but he had given up very little of his usual occupations. As often as possible, he invited his friends to the house, went on picnics, and loitered along the ocean’s edge to admire his wife and children swimming with baby seals. He even made a trip to Groton to show Billy the school he had so loved as a boy. (Billy was scheduled to begin studying there in the fall of 1961.) The variations of Bill’s condition
annoyed Mrs. Jay, who grumbled, “One moment Bill is dying and the next he is ordering up champagne.”
²³
Susan Mary preferred to toast his courage and made sure her ministrations were never too visible, trying to avoid treating her husband like an invalid in front of their friends. Still, discouragement sometimes got the better of her admiration. When a famous Boston physician told her that her husband was slowly suffocating to death, she wrote, “I bitterly asked the doctor if it was worth prolonging this discomfort, stupid of me, of course one must, but it’s hard to begin again.”
²⁴
Usually quick to feel guilt, Susan Mary did not blame herself for this particular disloyalty. Still, she never fell prey to the temptation to give up the fight, and ordered a new and improved respirator, “ruinous as usual and hard to get but surely worth it?”
²⁵

When they returned to Paris, Bill seemed to be doing better. They celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a dinner for twenty-four during which he made a toast to Susan Mary that brought tears to her eyes. Not long thereafter, Dr. Varay, who had become a friend, confirmed the American doctors’ diagnosis. He gave Bill three months to live. He was wrong, but by very little.

Long expected, played and replayed in gruesome rehearsals, the end came quietly. Spring had just begun, and on March 25, 1960, Bill was having a relatively comfortable day. Susan Mary took a walk and happened to see Khrushchev, who was visiting Paris. She went upstairs to tell her husband. Anne came home from school with good grades to show her parents. All three watched their new television together. That night, Bill fell into a coma. Susan Mary called a doctor who lived in the building, but
it was too late. Bill’s heart had given out and he died early on the morning of March 26, 1960.

In the days and weeks that followed, the children were a great comfort to Susan Mary. Anne and Billy kept themselves from crying, putting aside their own grief to take care of their mother. During the service at the American Cathedral in Paris, everybody noticed how tenderly they looked after her. For the first time in her life, Anne wrote a letter in English: “Dear Mummy, try to bee
raisonnable
. Everyone Love’s
vous
and me the most of all.”
²⁶
When they went to bed, the children would set their alarm clock for eleven in the evening to wake up, go into their mother’s room, and make her close her desk. One of them put out the lights, and the other opened the window. Susan Mary could not sleep (Gladwyn had forbade her from taking sleeping pills), but she did not dare get out of bed and contradict the orders of her guardian angels.

Her mother, on the other hand, was driving her crazy. Mrs. Jay never stopped making remarks in a stage whisper, taking the houseguests as witnesses, “Did you ever see anything so pitiful—so white—so fragile—so young?” Angrily, Susan Mary repeated her mother’s words to Gladwyn, noting, “None of which is true. Young,
hélas
I’m not—pitiful—I won’t be. Sad I am, not for Bill’s dying but for his living so unhappily these last years. I tried and failed to make him share the fear and loneliness I saw so often in his eyes. A cleverer, more tactful woman could have helped him.”
²⁷
This secret torment, largely unjustified, never left her mind at peace.

Susan Mary was surrounded by well-wishers. Letters and flowers arrived every day from friends and relations in Paris,
England, and the United States. To her great joy, Frank Giles and Bobetty Salisbury sang Bill’s praises in obituaries for the
Times
of London. At Easter, the Sulzbergers took her with them to the south of France for ten days, though the holiday did little for her extreme state of apathy and fatigue. Friends came up with ideas, usually advising her to live where they happened to be. Isaiah and Aline Berlin imagined she would be happy in Oxford, Gaston Palewski suggested Rome, Fred Warner recommended London (“you would grow plump and placid”
²⁸
), while the Lippmans leaned toward Washington and the Bostonians lobbied for Boston. Susan Mary only felt like playing with Anne and Anne’s Labrador, or seeing Gladwyn, which was difficult. The ambassador took the time, at Susan Mary’s request, to write the children affectionate letters. In May, Joe Alsop came to see her. The following month she went to the United States for Bill’s burial in a cemetery near Boston at the top of a small hill planted with pine and birch trees.

When she returned to France, Susan Mary rented a villa near Hossegor, north of Biarritz, spending her time with the Bordeaux-Groult family, Pierre and Elise, Timothy and Victoria, and Bobby and Daphné. The weather was bad, and the children were often sick and restless, but Susan Mary’s strength began to return. She went to see her friend Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais, and started to take an interest in the upcoming presidential election in the United States. When she returned to Paris in autumn, she enrolled as an auditor at the École des Sciences Politiques. Very Mildred Jungfleisch of her, was Mitford’s comment, saying that she would have to put it in the next edition of her book.
²⁹

Susan Mary’s studies in political science were only an interlude
before she had to face the nagging questions about her future. The writer Louis Auchincloss had congratulated her on the magnificent creation that had been her life with Bill, in spite of his illness. Isaiah Berlin also admired the family edifice she had managed to build. What should she dedicate her energy toward now? Adlai Stevenson believed in her organizational talents, although she felt she had none. She had little confidence in her own courage and did not know what to do with herself and the children. America seemed like the most obvious destination, but was it the best? Did she want to remarry? Gladwyn had returned to England, and in his letters he wrote that he imagined she would settle down with an American senator. She found a letter from Duff, written for her to read in 1960, at a time when he expected both he and Bill would be dead. He said she should marry a British ambassador to China or a secretary of state in a new Russian-Atlantic alliance. It was all quite absurd. There were no senators or secretaries of state lining up outside her door, just three marriage proposals.

“Two are girlhood admirers who I should think would run a mile if I accepted and they had to face the consequences, which includes divorcing nice if dull wives, the other is unexpected.”
³⁰

Joe Alsop’s Victory

In theory, the Kennedys had the game in the bag. The family ship was poised to set sail, riding on the winds of paternal fortune, success in the primary elections, and Bobby Kennedy’s effective war machine. But voters cannot always be controlled, and many of the party delegates who had gathered in the carnival-like atmosphere of the 1960 Democratic Convention at the Los Angeles Sports Arena still clung to their enduring affection for Adlai Stevenson, their losing candidate in the 1952 and 1956 elections. Warmed up in a standing ovation for Eleanor Roosevelt, who had chosen not to support John Kennedy, the delegates fell into a wave of hysteria when Stevenson’s name was proposed for nomination. From the grandstands to the arena floor, the entire stadium swayed, repeating the candidate’s name like a mantra, while the Stevenson majorettes threw caution to the wind and improvised a writhing war dance. Journalists who had already prepared reports on Kennedy’s victory became concerned that
their work was not over for the evening. But Bobby’s army tightened ranks and Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy was chosen by a broad majority. Tanned and handsome like an actor, he was a man of patrician tastes, if not of patrician birth. A veneer of wealth and his time at Harvard and in Great Britain had covered the traces of the Irish immigrant past—only Catholicism remained. He was a veteran of the Pacific war, obsessed with history, thoughtful when at rest, energetic in action, enthusiastic about his causes, tight-lipped about his secrets (womanizing and health problems). Kennedy had begun his campaign without support from liberals, farmers, unions, or black leaders, but his father and family stood behind him. At forty-three, he was much younger than the other Democratic candidates, and only his Republican opponent, the shadowy forty-seven-year-old Richard Nixon, was a little older than him.

Joe Alsop was pleased with Kennedy’s nomination. His man had won the first stretch of the race to the White House. The next day, he and his friend Phil Graham, the director of the
Washington Post
, went to Kennedy’s convention headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel to push for the nomination of Lyndon Johnson as the vice presidential candidate. Seated at his desk with his hands behind his head, a relaxed John Kennedy listened to the two journalists explain how Johnson, the Senate majority leader and a formidable politician, could bring in crucial Southern votes. During the discussion, Joe had the impression that Kennedy’s mind was made up and that Johnson had already been chosen to share the ticket.

That summer, the Kennedy clan gathered at Hyannis Port as usual, with the difference that reporters were running around the
property’s beach, lawns, and patios. This did not bother Kennedy, who managed to keep ahead of them, going sailing when he felt like it, but it annoyed his wife, who was having trouble adjusting to the physical demands and constant exposure of her new public life. Joe was very fond of Jackie, and when he was invited to spend a weekend with the Kennedys at the end of July, he reasoned with her about her obligations and assured her that she was capable of meeting them. He had less success when it came to taking part in the athletic family’s favorite pastimes. Holding Bobby’s five-year-old son, David, by the feet, he swung him around until the boy hit his head on a ceiling beam.

David turned white and bit his lip, but he soon asked, “Can we do it again?”

“Of course,” said Joe, who had gone even whiter than the child.

When Joe congratulated Ethel on her son’s courage she simply remarked, “Oh, we don’t allow crying. Do hold in your stomach, Joe.”
²

Observing the entire Kennedy family together was an awe-inspiring experience, “like Sparta,” wrote Joe to Susan Mary.
³

That summer, Joe Alsop’s letters came one after the other, each more patient, gentle, and persuasive than the last. His words aimed for Susan Mary’s heart, but they also found their way into her mind and touched her spirit. They told two stories. One was political. Although Joe had always declared himself a Republican and had voted for Eisenhower in 1952, he had come to think that the president was weak on national defense. So he had shifted his support to the Democrats, and particularly to Senator Kennedy, whose ascent he had watched with an interest that owed as much
to Kennedy’s charisma as to the firmness of his position on the development of America’s nuclear arsenal. In turn, Kennedy was aware of Joe’s potential impact as one of the most-read editorial writers in the country, under contract with the
New York Herald Tribune
, author of articles that appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers with a total readership of twenty-five million. What was more, Joe was cultured, funny, and seemed to know everybody through his Harvard, family, and professional connections. He gave great parties and was liberal with champagne, although Kennedy thought he did not invite enough pretty women. From early 1960 onward, the two men established a mutually beneficial relationship through meetings and conversations that Joe tried to play down to avoid attacks on his professionalism. He had no reason to hide this friendship from Susan Mary. Rather, far more openly and amusingly than in his columns, he wrote her a detailed account of JFK’s unstoppable ascent, a subject that riveted the whole of America.

The second story in Joe’s letters was rather more intimate and written in a very different, far less brazen tone. As humble as a pastor requesting a small donation to repair the church roof, who wrings his hands in anguish and is reluctant to cross the threshold of his wealthy parishioner’s house for fear of being a bother, he wrote to Susan Mary in June 1960 to ask her to marry him. He explained that he had not dared to do so during his visit to Paris the previous month for fear that she would laugh in his face. For her sake, he would change careers and live wherever she wanted, even in Europe. He did not expect her to be in love with him. She would be free to leave him if she fell in love with somebody else. Better still, if she currently had a lover, which was likely—how
else could she have made it through the torment of the past years—she was welcome to continue seeing him. Joe would put up with it. Finally, he told her he was homosexual.

Susan Mary’s answer was prompt and firm: marriage was out of the question. But it took more than a polite refusal to discourage stubborn Joe. With the eloquence and obstinacy he had used to support America’s entry into World War II, General Chennault’s policies in China, the State Department’s loyalty brought into question by McCarthy, and the existence of a missile gap, Joe set to work trying to change Susan Mary’s mind. Although she said she would not marry him, she kept asking for political news, and he used this as an excuse to continue writing, pleading his case while mixing in politics and concocting a future in which Susan Mary, Joe, and Kennedy would rule Washington and, by extension, the world.

Joe’s homosexuality was not discussed in Washington circles and most of his friends seemed to be unaware of it, apart from his brother Stewart. Although some may have had a suspicion, they kept it to themselves out of propriety, indifference, or embarrassment. To them, Joe was just a bachelor who had no girlfriend but liked beautiful and intelligent women. He adored risqué stories, and on hearing them, his eyes would sparkle behind his round glasses. Joe was also an excellent conversationalist if he managed to stay calm and not drink too much. He was a popular guest in Washington’s best houses, and nobody called him, as Gore Vidal later did in one of his novels, the Baron de Charlus of Georgetown.