American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (23 page)

“You’ve known everyone. Haven’t you met the Clintons yet?”

“My dear girl, you’re making me a glamour girl and I’m just an old lady.”
⁷

Her house remained a rallying point for English visitors to the American capital, such as writer Artemis Cooper, Duff’s granddaughter, and her husband, historian Antony Beevor, or Princess Michael of Kent, for whom Susan Mary gave a dinner party to which Colin Powell was also invited. When she went to visit the diplomat Avis Bohlen in Paris, it was as though she were back in the old days, making the rounds of the couturiers and being feted by all her friends. People remarked on her elegance when she gave a black-tie party in June 1993 to celebrate the college graduation of her grandson, Sam. Three years later, Sam was stabbed trying to protect his grandmother from a mugger in the street. He emerged relatively unscathed from the event, and Susan Mary, who had kept her cool throughout, praised him for behaving like a Secret Service agent. Wearing a pomegranate silk dress with feathers in her hair and pearls in her ears, she was the belle of the ball organized by charming Pie Friendly for the centennial of the Washington Historical Society. While refusing the label, she kept up her reputation as “fashion doyenne” to the point of wearing gowns that were so fitted she could not remove them without assistance. One evening after dinner, Susan Mary pressed a friend to stay for a drink, then slipped away into the next room with the maid. There was a sound of rustling fabric, and Susan Mary returned, smiling, wearing a slightly different black dress.

“I revel in the thought of old age, think of all the time to read
Trevelyan and Toynbee and Balzac and hot water bottles and one’s happy life to look back on,” thirty-three-year-old Susan Mary had once told Duff.
⁸
What would she have said forty years later? Hot water bottles were, of course, available, but reading was increasingly difficult and memories were often painful. Scotch or vodka became necessary to make it through the day, waiting and waiting for the evening, which would hopefully bring company. Drink dissolved solitude, regrets faded into peaceful nostalgia, the end drifted further away.

The effects of this self-medication might have been less noticeable on a sturdier frame, but Susan Mary was extremely thin and hardly ate at all. Gemma, who had been looking after her since Joe’s death, often had to call Bill or one of the grandchildren who happened to be at home to come and put a teetering Susan Mary to bed, the same Susan Mary with whom, earlier that afternoon, they had gone shopping or discussed the Maine Republicans’ chances of keeping their seat in Congress. Distressing though it was, her family had to admit that sometimes their energetic, dignified, and exemplary grandmother had trouble remaining upright. There were multiple incidents during the summer of 1995—fainting and falls that often ended at the Mount Desert Island Hospital. Susan Mary would promise to try to control herself, but her children decided that goodwill alone was not enough and that they had to help their mother overcome her bad habits. There was a plan to move her to Utah to be closer to Anne, but it was not a good idea for her granddaughters to see her in such a condition. In short, something had to be done.

One October morning in 1995, Susan Mary was driven to a hotel room near Connecticut Avenue where her two children, her
granddaughter Eliza, her assistant, Jan Wentworth, three of her closest friends—Polly Fritchey, Nancy Pierrepont, and Charlie Whitehouse—and a counselor from an alcohol treatment center were waiting. Each of them told her why she needed to get help—out of respect for those who loved her, and for herself. Poor Susan Mary thanked them all politely.

“There’s a room reserved for you at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Minnesota,” the counselor gently explained.

“When do I have to go?”

“This afternoon.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’m not available this afternoon. I’m expecting people from
AD.
” She flipped through her planner. “What about May?”

But she hated scenes and had to admit defeat. That same afternoon, Bill took the plane with his mother and accompanied her to Saint Mary’s. Susan Mary saw the treatment as a trap from which she had to escape as soon as possible. For her family, it was a necessary step toward what they hoped might be a cure.

The treatment involved family therapy sessions. On October 31, 1995, during a meeting with Bill, Anne, John Milliken, and one of the hospital’s counselors, Susan Mary began telling about Duff’s death and Diana’s courage in its aftermath. Bill did not understand the point of the story that the rest of the group seemed to be following expectantly. Then the therapist made a sign and Susan Mary, as though on cue, announced in an almost detached tone, “Oh, yes, of course, and he’s your father.”

Bill burst into tears and left the room.

In uttering that sentence, Susan Mary was obeying orders. Her daughter, who had known for a long time the identity of
Bill’s real father, and the staff of Saint Mary’s had insisted that she reveal what she had kept hidden for so long. Perhaps the confession was also her way of taking revenge for the treatment she was forced into, an undignified and quite useless ordeal, as she saw it. Perhaps she was unburdening herself. Or she may have thought that Bill, now forty-seven, was entitled to know the truth. It is hard to say whether she was speaking for her own sake, for her son’s, or simply because she was made to. She never brought the matter up again and may have regretted speaking at all; but at the time, she must have felt an angry satisfaction at having caused chaos, a fitting epilogue to the unpleasant and embarrassing weeks she had undergone.

Shortly after the revelation, the burden of which was now Bill’s alone, Susan Mary left the hospital.

The Summer of 2004

The stay at Saint Mary’s was beneficial for a few years, then Susan Mary slowly returned to the comfort of alcohol, with all its inevitable consequences. The vain and tiresome struggle began anew between two children trying to protect their mother from herself and an aging woman who refused to accept the diagnosis and the treatment it entailed. She intended to continue living her life as always. Susan Mary was from a different generation born well before World War II that drank hard liquor like orange juice, inhaled smoke, and crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners. Gemma had returned to Italy, and sometimes the Philippine servants who had replaced her had their hands full. Panicked, they would call the hospital and Susan Mary would be whisked to the emergency
room. “Let’s get out of here,” she once told Jan Wentworth, who had come to visit her.

Still, daily life was not all hardship. She wrote a few articles for
AD
and could still read with a magnifying glass. When she grew tired of this, she listened on tape to her favorite English authors: the Brontë sisters, Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins. They were like the handrail on a rocky boat. During summers in Maine, she got together with her friends Nancy Pyne, Nancy Pierrepont, Bob and Sylvia Blake, Muffie Cabot, and Frankie FitzGerald. She walked more slowly, but she still went on the same strolls, stopping when she was overwhelmed by vertigo. In 2000, she managed to visit her niece Maisie Houghton, who lived on an island south of Northeast Harbor. In 2001, she received Béatrice de Durfort, Louise de Rougemont’s granddaughter. Dinners continued, Susan Mary bravely keeping a busy social calendar at the age of eighty. People continued to meet in her house, like columnists Kevin Chaffee and Dominick Dunne (the latter recounted the details of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Susan Mary thought utterly silly). When Amanda Downes from the British Embassy or the French curator Sylvain Bellenger came to tea, they found a woman whose hair and makeup were done and who still knew all the latest political gossip. She impressed biographer Sally Bedell Smith with her precise memories of the Kennedys; journalist Sally Quinn was struck by how well informed she was. Each of these encounters was a carefully prepared performance, usually pulled off with success. Keeping the flag flying was a duty, one that helped Susan Mary keep away sadness and loneliness.

Apart from her granddaughters’ visits (Sam was working
abroad at the time), one of Susan Mary’s greatest joys during those years was her friendship with Rob Brown and Todd Davis, two interior decorators who, in the spring of 1996, had bought and renovated the house next door. Wary of the welcome that they would receive in a neighborhood that had a reputation for disliking noise and novelty, they presented themselves at Mrs. Alsop’s door with orchids. Someone in a pink dressing gown appeared behind the maid. Susan Mary exclaimed at the beauty of the flowers and invited them to sit on the stoop. They started chatting.

“I’m having a little dinner party for some friends and I’d be so pleased if you could come. But perhaps you’d find it dull.”

Todd and Rob politely accepted the invitation, expecting an old ladies’ party. On the said evening, they found themselves in an immaculate dining room with an experienced hostess who introduced them to Paige Rense and the British ambassador’s wife. Decorating jobs soon came their way and their careers were officially launched, as Susan Mary had hoped. The trio became inseparable. The young men invited Susan Mary to their house or took her to Galileo, a fashionable Italian restaurant. She showed them Maine as she knew it, blithely ignoring the
NO TRESPASSING
signs—after all, Mount Desert Island was her home—taking them to David Rockefeller’s gardens and Martha Stewart’s house where she had danced as a girl.

In 2001, her “dear boys” left Washington. That same year, Charlie Whitehouse died, followed by Kay Graham. Evangeline Bruce had passed away in 1995. “We’re all so old or dead. There’s almost no one left.”
⁹
Susan Mary was still there, but she was finally starting to look her age.

Her condition began to worsen during the summer of 2002. Her lungs functioned poorly and fatigue could not be resisted. She went to Maine one last time, and, in September, attended the marriage of her beloved granddaughter Eliza. Back in Washington, she stopped the parties and the writing for
Architectural Digest
. Everything was becoming difficult and she took to her bed. Lying there, she listened to Jim Lehrer’s
NewsHour
at six every evening. Family and friends, Kay Evans, Pie Friendly, her Zimmermann nephews, Deedy Ogden, and Jan Wentworth, surrounded her with devoted care. Anne came regularly from Utah and took care of everything. People found Susan Mary calm; at times she had a vacant look about her, though when her alertness returned, she always had a kind word for them. They took turns reading to her, especially Bill Blair, her childhood friend from Bar Harbor, the first boy with whom she had gone to the movies. Now a retired ambassador, he came to see her three times a week at two in the afternoon. He would go upstairs and read to her from the
New York Times
, biographies, and Cecil Beaton’s memoirs, avoiding passages that mentioned Duff. Sometimes the phone would ring and Bill Blair would see her pick it up with sudden energy. Susan Mary was not in pain but she slept a lot. It was as though she were watching her own exit from the world; since the show did not please her, she preferred to keep her eyes shut.

At the beginning of 2004, it became clear that life was leaving her tired little body. In early summer, her family gathered around her for a farewell. Afterward, Susan Mary, who had always avoided emotional display, merely asked if there was any cake left. Bill went to France to join his wife, Sydney, in the Pyrenees,
where they had a house in the high Luchon valley. Anne stayed on with Susan Mary for a few peaceful and loving weeks. She had always known how to make her mother smile, and their final days together were sweet. On the afternoon of August 18, she called her brother to tell him that it was all over. Bill went out into the garden. Night had fallen and the stars lit up the sky over France.

It rained when Susan Mary’s ashes were scattered over the ocean off the coast of Maine, but the weather was beautiful on September 24, 2004, the day of the funeral service at Christ Church in Georgetown, the church Susan Mary had attended every Sunday. She would have been glad to hear the words that were spoken in her memory, to see the grace and dignity with which her granddaughters took care of those in attendance, and the number of people who filled the church. She would have also liked the articles that appeared in American and British newspapers in homage to her extraordinary life. The chorus of praise called her a legendary hostess, an American aristocrat, and the witness of a bygone era. Some pointed out that this true lady had been known by her given name, a tender and mischievous name, almost childish—Susan Mary. It was what everybody called her.

As stated at the beginning of the Sources and Bibliography, most of the sources on Susan Mary Alsop come from her family’s personal archives, kindly put at my disposal by Susan Mary’s son, William S. Patten. I would like to express my profound gratitude for the trust and generosity Mr. Patten has shown since our first meeting in the summer of 2006 in his beautiful house in the French Pyrenees where he and his wife, Sydney, regularly stay. Bill and Sydney were also kind enough to welcome my sister, Aniela Vilgrain, who helped with this project, to their former home in Massachusetts. The project then began to shuttle back and forth between Aniela’s house in Washington, where she lives, and my home in France. All these meetings gave birth to a friendship that is very dear to both Aniela and me.

I would also like to thank Anne Milliken, Susan Mary’s daughter, for her valuable assistance and the warm hospitality she and her husband, John, extended to Aniela, whom they invited to Salt Lake City, where Anne spoke with Aniela at length about her mother. I also had the pleasure of meeting Susan Mary’s
grandchildren Sam and Sybil Patten, and having a telephone conversation with Eliza Patten.

David Sulzberger was immediately interested in the project and he proved endlessly helpful, efficient, and generous in Paris, London, and New York. His part in this book is an important one, and I am most grateful to him.