American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (18 page)

She and Joe stayed in a villa that was “probably built by the assistant vice-president of the Banque de l’Indochine about 1900.”
¹¹
The city was off-limits to military personnel and there was not a single GI in sight, but the local officials were welcoming and relaxed. Susan Mary spent time with her cousin Charlie Whitehouse, who was in charge of pacifying the surrounding provinces. She played tennis early in the morning before the heat of the day and explored the city in the American ambassador’s Ford, which seemed shabby when compared to the British ambassador’s Rolls-Royce, but was armored and equipped with an automatic rifle, as she discovered when a bomb exploded in the street. In spite of this, she refused to wear a bulletproof vest, saying, “too hot, I preferred to die.”
¹²
For months, she had been looking forward to seeing Angkor Wat, but the trip was ultimately canceled because the United States was preparing to send troops into Cambodia in March 1970. “
Tant pis
, I’m off to Northern Thailand, said to be very pretty.”
¹³

Although she enjoyed visiting new places, Susan Mary was no ordinary tourist. Back in Washington, she let it be known that she had been favorably impressed by American action on the ground in Vietnam, an opinion that was repeated in high places.
However hostile he was to the press and ill at ease with Georgetown society, President Nixon cultivated Joe’s support of the war and knew about Susan Mary. On May 8, 1970, he sent her a note. “Your encouragements for our country’s goal in Southeast Asia mean a great deal to America’s fighting men as well as to me. I was pleased to hear from you and I want you to know how much your comments are appreciated.”
¹⁴
She did not think the Republican president a very appealing man, but the letter was flattering.

While Susan Mary was extremely grateful to Joe for the trip and knew what she owed him—“all my historic moments have been with you”
¹⁵
—she still had to endure the continuing unpleasantness that resulted from her husband’s passionate commitment to the Vietnam War. At the beginning of 1970, the humorist and
Washington Post
columnist Art Buchwald had a play on Broadway called
Sheep on the Runway
. It told the story of an American journalist’s disastrous visit to Nonomura, an imaginary principality near the Chinese border. When the journalist, Joe Mayflower, wrongly perceives a Communist threat from the inoffensive rebellion brewing in the north of Nonomura, he sounds the alarm in Washington. In less than no time, the peaceful country is wracked with fire and bathed in blood.

Art Buchwald could protest all he liked, everybody knew that Joe Mayflower was Joe Alsop. Joe took it very badly, considered suing Buchwald, and forbade his friends from seeing the play. Stewart flew to his brother’s rescue, but most of Washington just chose sides and was highly amused. There were other distasteful happenings. One Sunday in November, obscene drawings referring to Joe were made on a car parked in front of a church in their neighborhood. “A ridiculous little episode,”
¹⁷
said Susan Mary dismissively, supporting her husband without ever alluding to his sexuality. Then she found hurtful words about Joe on her own car. Things got even worse when the compromising photos of Joe taken in Moscow in 1957 resurfaced and began circulating through town, probably at the initiative of Soviet agents. Fortunately, everybody remained calm and the incident stopped there.

In spite of these worries, the year ended on a positive note.
Billy (now known as Bill) married Kate Bacon in Boston on December 19. Kate’s mother, lovely Kitty, was the youngest of Susan Mary’s cousins. It was a family marriage prepared by the two mothers and by Joe, who went to a lot of trouble because he loved his stepson and wanted things to be done properly. Two years earlier he had been similarly involved in Anne’s wedding to George Crile, the son of a good family from Cleveland. “It is odd for a man who has never had children of his own to enjoy being a father and to long to be a grandfather,” Joe Alsop wrote to one of his friends.
¹⁸
Susan Mary also remarked on this enthusiasm, but with a touch of acidity: “Joe sees romance in the touching way that childless people often do.”
¹⁹
Because she thought her daughter was too young to be getting married—pretty Anne had just turned eighteen—she had tried to delay the event, behaving, she said in a letter to Marietta, “like the Eastern dowager in a high dog collar.”
²⁰
She did not protest with much conviction, though, and the marriage took place on September 21, 1968, the date originally decided on by the young couple. Anne and George moved to the West Coast, where Susan Mary was happy to go and visit them. Barefoot in the California sunshine, she felt, for a short, blessed moment, that she was no longer proper Mrs. Alsop.

Susan Mary liked speed, especially behind the wheel. She hated waiting and easily grew impatient. Although new things interested her, at the end of the 1960s the world seemed to be changing at a dizzying pace. As soon as she got used to the idea of rock and roll being played at elegant dinner dances, Bob Dylan replaced Elvis Presley. After Courrèges, she thought hemlines would remain high, but once she had her skirts tailored, she discovered that Saint Laurent was lengthening them again and
even making flowing ankle-length dresses. What was one to do? Luckily, being thin never seemed to go out of fashion. In New York, she had to give up an old favorite, the red-and-gold opera house, and become acquainted with the new Metropolitan Opera, which had been built as part of Lincoln Center. There were also unknown faces at parties. “Very clever or very pretty people who have nothing to do with New York society as it was when I was young. Rather more fun on the whole—not a fine old name in the lot.”
²¹
But Susan Mary remained intrepid. In January 1972, she treated herself to a little plastic surgery. It pleased Joe and she happily reported to her son, “Everyone should have their faces lifted, it’s morale building.”
²²
She went to see the new shows, such as the film
Alice’s Restaurant
and the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar,
with the Margeries and their son Gilles. During the musical, the audience whistled in disapproval when they heard the actors recite classic, respected texts. “I thought that Jesus, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King were still OK—clearly I was wrong. Back to school.”
²³

An age was passing. Joe’s mother, always warm and loving with Susan Mary, died in June 1971. Stewart was hospitalized for a harmless problem that turned out to be leukemia. Bravely, he battled the disease to the end, going through repeated stays in clinics and transfusions for which Joe often donated his own blood. Mrs. Jay had also grown weaker, suffering strokes in 1967 and 1969 that hampered her autonomy without dampening her severity. Powerless, she remained imperious and demanding, with brief moments of sentimentality that made her cling to her daughter. Old Mrs. Jay was very fond of Anne and happy about the birth of Bill’s son, Sam, her great-grandson, in the summer of
1971. The baby spent the first few months of his life at Dumbarton Avenue.

There were also upheavals in foreign politics. Faced with the difficult task of pulling America out of Vietnam, Nixon, assisted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was pursuing negotiations begun in Paris, while continuing to use force on the ground. The offensive side of this strategy pleased Joe, who was moreover very supportive of Kissinger, a figure he had immediately recognized and adopted as one of his own. A Washington newcomer in 1969, Kissinger was a Harvard professor who had become the darling of Georgetown and a close friend to Joe and Susan Mary.

On February 7, 1971, preparations for the Alsops’ usual Sunday dinner for twenty-four were already under way when the president called and recommended that Joe turn on the television at ten in the evening. Kay Graham, who was single-handedly running the
Washington Post
empire since the death of her husband, went into Susan Mary’s bedroom to call her team. Kissinger had barely arrived for dinner when the phone started ringing. He received eleven calls over the course of the evening, with an impressed but annoyed Susan Mary serving as his switchboard operator. At ten o’clock, the guests gathered around the television, but there was no White House speech, only a short announcement from the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu.

“Why on earth did he call us?” Joe asked Susan Mary. “We look like awful fools.”

“That’s Washington for you. How is one to interpret a President’s thinking?”
²⁴

The next day, South Vietnamese troops began invading Laos
in hopes of cutting supply lines to North Vietnam. The operation reawakened violent antiwar protests in the United States.

The ongoing war in Vietnam did not prevent Nixon and Kissinger from seeking détente with China and the Soviet Union. On July 18, 1971, Kissinger came to see the Alsops on his return from a secret trip to Beijing, where he had met with Zhou Enlai. It was the first time in almost twenty-five years that American and Chinese officials had come into contact. That evening, the atmosphere at Dumbarton Avenue was positively electric. An excellent storyteller, Kissinger outdid himself, and although he did not go into the substance of the talks, what little he told was highly interesting.

The following spring, the Nixons had a small reception for the eighty-eighth birthday of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Joe’s impertinent cousin, who was feared and revered by all of Washington. Over drinks, Susan Mary chatted with a particularly warm and relaxed president. He told her about his recent meeting with Mao, whom he found physically exhausted but intellectually alert. Their conversation continued at dinner. Joe, who approved of the opening of relations with China so as better to confound the Soviet Union, was nevertheless worried about America’s gullibility concerning Chinese leaders. Piqued, Kissinger tried to reassure him.

“We trust none of them,” Kissinger said.

“Nor do they we but they have had a chance to sum us up, judge us, have some sort of idea of how we think, our pattern of thought,” said Nixon. “Surely this is useful?”

“It’s not just useful,” declared Joe, more Mayflower than ever, “it’s tremendously important.”
²⁵

In November 1972, the Alsops made their own journey to Beijing. Susan Mary had been studying and could recite all the Chinese dynasties by heart.

“This
is
the trip of my life.”
²⁶
It was almost an official voyage, and it included a meeting with the Chinese prime minister. From half past nine in the evening until one in the morning, Joe listened to Zhou Enlai talk about birth control, agricultural production, and Leonid Brezhnev, whom Zhou found even more fearsome than Khrushchev. Seated next to the two men in the huge reception hall, Susan Mary took notes.

“Is there anything I can do for you during your visit, Mr. Alsop?” asked Zhou at the end of the conversation.

“There is, Sir. I would like to take my wife traveling into the interior.”

“Where?”

“To Yunnan and Szechwan. Would that be impossible?”

“Not at all. When would you like to go? Would three o’clock suit you?”
²⁷

At the appointed time, they boarded a military plane. Resplendent in his brand-new red fox fur hat, Joe revisited the places he had flown across thirty years earlier with General Chennault. But Susan Mary’s favorite memory remained the Forbidden City.

“There were tall willows, water and two old musicians playing their instruments against the walls, because the sound, the resonance is better that way. It was haunting, just a moment of old China. Silence, but for the musicians. Then noise, interpreters, all that, but we noticed the moment, and loved it.”
²⁸

The Breakup

Devotion is not always disinterested. It can help fight boredom, build up credit, or even serve as subtle revenge upon a person whose ascendancy is reduced by age or sickness. None of this applied to Susan Mary. Her upbringing had left her with a sharp sense of responsibility, “a noble child of Duty,” Joe used to say, raising his eyes to heaven. Susan Mary liked to think this was the driving force behind her actions, and perhaps it was. Taking care of her mother seemed as necessary and normal as writing to the elderly woman in France who had looked after her children, or visiting the sick at Washington’s General Hospital, something she had done for years. Susan Mary liked being of use—she would lend a dress or connect people with such rapidity that those she helped hardly realized it. Her children had always been the first objects of her attention, often financial in form. In fact, where they were concerned, generosity came more naturally to her than an open ear. It was through letters and presents that she showed her love.

But the full measure of Susan Mary’s talents unfolded when duty crossed paths with friendship. She could be silent when it was fitting, full of sensible advice and resolute when needed. This happened in July 1965, when she stayed at Marietta’s side in London after the death of her cherished Adlai Stevenson, and in August 1972, when she delayed her return to the United States to be in France with Elise Bordeaux-Groult, whose asthma and nervous fatigue had got the better of her. A year later, Elise’s suffering grew worse and Susan Mary flew to France again, trying
to stand between her sick friend and the inevitable. On June 27, Elise died in the American Hospital. A few days later, her family and friends dined together on the Rue du Bac. The evening had begun normally, as Marina Sulzberger recounted. Then “one by one they broke down. Susan Mary a rock. She is fabulous. But all of us undone.”
²⁹