American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (15 page)

Yet the FBI and CIA knew that Joe had interests beyond collecting Bronze Age and Asian art. There had been two
incidents of note. The most troubling one happened in Moscow in February 1957 when Joe fell into a trap laid by the KGB. After showing him photos of himself with a young man in a hotel room, the Russian agents proposed he collaborate with them, an offer Joe refused before being quickly shuttled out of the country by the American Embassy. Back in the States, Joe went straight to the FBI and told them what had happened. The affair ended there, but the KGB kept the photos, and J. Edgar Hoover kindly leaked Joe’s FBI file to Eisenhower’s staff. Some of them were tempted to use the information when Joe’s articles became too negative, but this never happened. Still, the risk was always there.
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Joe’s revelation came as a complete surprise to Susan Mary. She was both intrigued and touched by his openness. She asked Elise Bordeaux-Groult if she thought a marriage under such terms was possible. Without really understanding the significance of what Joe had told her, she interpreted his confession as a hint at a possible change in his nature. From the little he said about himself, she re-created him completely in her own imagination. Before his confession, she had known only his noisy triumphs, his clamoring affection, and the admiration he laid out before her like a luxurious sable coat. A new person seemed to appear beneath Joe’s tough exterior, someone timid, lonely, vulnerable, in need of tenderness. At the age of fifty, it seemed he finally wanted to be like everybody else. Perhaps, she felt, it was her duty to rescue him, to take the hand he was holding out. Little by little, she overcame her misgivings and hesitation, and began to believe in the version of Joe suggested by his letters. At the end of the year, he came to see her in Paris, and it seemed her instinct was correct. In December she wrote to Marietta,
explaining: “As the correspondence continued I began to know a new Joe that I didn’t know existed and I began to think, oh, well, it would be a good idea for the children etc. and being a hopeless romantic couldn’t make up my mind.”
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In the same letter, she announced that she had fallen in love with Joe and was getting married to him.

It is tempting to reduce Susan Mary’s final consent after seven months of letter writing to a reasonable transaction between two people from the same social circle with the same tastes, memories, and ambitions. Many did. Indeed, both Joe and Susan Mary were far too realistic not to realize how beneficial the marriage would be. Joe would be provided with a family, one that he had always known. It was a social advantage and a personal comfort that improved his standing and respectability. Susan Mary would have a new home, enter a political clan, and become one of Washington’s most sought-after hostesses—such was Joe’s prestige and position in the community. She also knew that Joe loved her children and would make an excellent stepfather to Billy and Anne. As to the rest—oh well. She could do without it. She had already done without it for quite some time. Or maybe Joe would change.

Still, cold-blooded calculation alone does not account for Susan Mary’s gamble in choosing to marry Joe. Neither of them could have imagined such an arrangement if they had not already been linked by an old and affectionate friendship. In a way, marriage seemed the next logical step. Bill Patten’s memory also had an influence: Joe felt responsible toward the widow and children of his dead friend, and Susan Mary felt she could trust a man who had always been loyal to her husband. Finally, Joe’s
and Susan Mary’s fantasies seem to have weighed on their decision. Joe, who knew women only in formal, social terms, had fallen in love with a vision more than with an actual person. He expected Susan Mary to conform to an impossible ideal of grace and intelligence. On her side, Susan Mary had given in to the charms of Joe’s tender pleading, a tone she wrongly thought he would always use, and which was soon replaced by verbal sparring. Civilized camaraderie might have been an achievable goal for their partnership, but Susan Mary and Joe, although highly sophisticated, were both in their own ways romantic at heart.

Dumbarton Avenue

2720 Dumbarton Avenue was a plain yellow concrete cube, barely hidden by a curtain of ivy and clematis, a blemish on Georgetown’s streets, which were lined with charming redbrick houses fallen out of a Victorian picture album. Deeming amateur architecture a gentlemanly pursuit, Joe had drafted the plans for the house when he bought the plot of land in 1949, and had immensely enjoyed the shock it gave his neighbors (they soon took measures to change local laws and make sure that a similar outrage would not repeat itself). Susan Mary could not help sighing at the sight of the building—“ugly as sin,”
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in her opinion—but the spacious interior was more to her liking. The house’s two wings surrounded a garden created by Bunny Mellon that contained eight different sorts of boxwood ennobling the little patch of green with their geometric forms. Inside the house, which also served as his office, Joe kept his collections of family portraits, porcelain,
Oriental carpets, French furniture, silk screens, and books on art and architecture. The result was warm, polished, comfortable. Joe tolerated nothing less than perfection, and a Philippine couple took care of the housekeeping under his watchful supervision. Every morning, dressed in a kimono, he eagerly discussed the day’s menus with the cook before changing into one of his English suits and going into the study to review the day’s schedule with his secretary, Miss Puffenberger, whom he called Puff.

In a letter of congratulations written on learning of the upcoming marriage, Marietta’s twenty-year-old daughter, Frankie FitzGerald, shrewdly wondered what place Susan Mary, her godmother, would assume in Joe’s clockwork existence. She even dared to slip in a prescient warning: “One thing disturbs me—and that is it may not be a practical arrangement. Can you cook? Your chefs will be so enraged when they hear about each other that they will either resign or feed you nothing but soufflés in violent, jealous competition.”
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Joe’s younger brother Stewart also recommended that his future sister-in-law not let herself be dominated. He knew what he was talking about, for the two brothers had cosigned their editorials until 1958, when Stewart, wanting to be free, went his own way.

At the beginning, Joe was thrilled and determined to please. As admirable Miss Puff put it, “Mr. Alsop thinks—in fact he knows—that he invented marriage.”
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He did more than make room to accommodate the Patten family’s arrival. The whole house was rearranged and expanded with a new garage (Joe did not drive, but Susan Mary did), a swimming pool, and a large bedroom for the
bride. Her dresses were hung on two levels in a separate room, with a special hook to reach the top row, as at the dry cleaner’s.

The marriage of Susan Mary Patten—widow of a man she had stopped loving long before he died—and Joseph Alsop—a bachelor with a double life—was celebrated at All Saints Episcopalian Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on February 16, 1961. Susan Mary would have preferred a small ceremony with the children in Paris, but her mother, who did not like Joe, had refused to make the trip. Joe returned to France with his wife before leaving for Laos to check on whether his domino effect theory of Communist expansion might begin in the small kingdom where a dangerous guerrilla army was running wild.

Susan Mary prepared to leave Paris, its gray walls, zinc roofs, and ever-changing skies. The city, about to be abandoned, wooed her with its prettiest accordion tunes. In autumn, a new life began. The children had to learn to speak with an American accent. Billy was at Groton and Anne went to the Potomac School. In her lovely bedroom hung with Persian blue and white wallpaper, Susan Mary tried not to dwell in a past haunted by memories. After all, as everybody was continuously and affectionately telling her, she had finally come home. Yet for years afterward, she would avoid visiting certain rooms at the National Gallery, because Impressionist paintings of the French countryside made her heart throb with sadness.

The Kennedy Years

In America, hope returns every four years. On January 20, 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, standing bareheaded in the freezing cold, swore to defend the Constitution and champion freedom. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” The drowsy Eisenhower years were suddenly over. Nobody knew what exactly the “New Frontier” stood for—victory over Communism, the end of poverty, the conquest of outer space? Whatever it was, the new president embodied it perfectly. The resonant tone of his address thrilled Susan Mary in Paris. The next day, Joe called to tell her that Inauguration Day, begun at the Capitol, had ended at his house. After making the round of the inaugural balls, the president had turned up on Joe’s doorstep in white tie and tails, smiling, his thick, tousled hair dusted with snow. It was long past midnight and a party was still under way. The guests rose to their feet to greet him. Before the day was over, Kennedy wanted to relive it among friends. He drank a glass of champagne.

“The only problem was that there was nothing to eat in the house except left over terrapin soup which he doesn’t like,” Joe explained to Susan Mary.

“So what did you do?”

“I had it heated up. Thank God this time next year you will be
there and able to cook up a meal on these occasions if they occur again, which I fervently hope they won’t. The very last thing I want is to be known publicly as an intimate of Mr. Kennedy’s as it makes my colleagues of the press furious.”
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Of course, the next day the entire city knew about Zeus’s descent from the clouds, and Joe’s house passed into Washington legend, adding to its owner’s glory.
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The meeting soon repeated itself. Two days later, Joe was invited to the first dinner given by John and Jackie in the White House. Between them, nine people consumed more than ten pounds of caviar, bemoaning all the while the ugliness of the house; Joe wailed that it was decorated like a small-town hotel. On February 14, he introduced his fiancée to the Kennedys two days before he and Susan Mary were to be married. The president loved gossip, whether from the pressroom or from London drawing rooms; Susan Mary told him about Lady Dorothy Cavendish, the wife of British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was quietly carrying on an outrageous affair. She told the story well and made him laugh, which was one of the two things he expected from a woman. The next day, Jacqueline Kennedy sent her a friendly note saying how happy she was that they had met at last. She asked Susan Mary to call her Jackie, even though, she wrote, it was a nickname she disliked.

So it was that Joe kept the promises he had made to Susan Mary, far and above his wildest hopes. Graced with the Kennedys’ favor, the Alsops figured among the star cast of an exceptional presidency. Although they did not quite belong to the innermost circle, they were regular guests at the White House, dancing the twist at cocktails and balls, dining at
intimate parties of eight, six, and even four people that Jackie organized to keep her husband entertained. Pretty, witty, well-dressed Susan Mary often sat on President Kennedy’s right. Her European experience also appealed to Jackie, and she was asked to join the committee in charge of finding new paintings for the White House, together with art experts and influential figures such as beautiful Babe Paley.

At the beginning of her husband’s presidency, Jackie Kennedy had launched a considerable renovation project at the White House. She gathered an efficient group of people who cajoled would-be donors into generosity. Henry Francis du Pont, a great American art collector, whom Susan Mary had known since childhood, was appointed chairman. The decorator Stéphane Boudin was also called in to help, but this was kept secret because he was French and it was important not to give an impression of foreign influence. Susan Mary admired the willpower Jackie hid behind her deferential and reserved demeanor, particularly her talent for defusing tension between the oversensitive du Pont and Boudin. When du Pont did not like a particular painting, Jackie quickly had it removed, saying, “Of course you’re right, Mr. du Pont.” At their next lunch meeting, Susan Mary noticed that Jackie was beaming and the painting was back in its place. Her billionaire adviser did not dare say a thing.

Besides historic furniture, the art committee acquired five hundred paintings and engravings. By the end of the year, the White House had been transformed. On January 15, 1962, CBS made a documentary about the restoration with Jackie leading the tour. That evening, some of the rushes of the seven-hour session were shown to the Kennedys and close friends, the Alsops among
them. Everybody congratulated Jackie. Exhausted, hair down, sipping on her scotch, she savored the praise from her husband, who had disliked his own performance on screen.

The Kennedys also willingly accepted invitations to dine at Dumbarton Avenue. These were evenings during which Anne had to give up her bedroom to Secret Service officers. Jackie sensed that Joe admired her, and felt she could talk to him about everything that interested her, meaning anything but politics. The president knew he would be given good French wines and meet interesting or amusing guests, often pretty and well-born English women. In December 1961 he dined in the company of the Duchess of Devonshire, who was a great friend of his. He also met Diana Cooper in February 1963. “What a woman!” he exclaimed, thoroughly charmed by the septuagenarian. In June of the same year, he invited himself over to the Alsops’ house while Jackie was away in the country. He had just made an important speech on American-Soviet relations, but he turned the conversation to the Profumo affair, a spicy London cocktail of sex, politics, and espionage. He chatted with Mary Meyer, his current mistress, and flirted for a long while with young Antonia Fraser. Sir Maurice Bowra, former vice-chancellor of Oxford, was furious to receive only thirty seconds of presidential attention. As Joe later told his friend Evangeline Bruce, Kennedy looked that evening “rather like a small boy wondering whether to plunge a spoon into a fresh dish of peach ice cream.”
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