American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (3 page)

*
  
To Marietta from Paris 1945–1960,
pp. 42–43.

*
  
To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960
, p. 93.

†
  Ibid., p. 307.

‡
  Ibid., p. 310.

*
  
To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960
, p. 183.

*
  As quoted in Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. r337.

John Jay

Benjamin Franklin and John Jay made a good team. Wearing fur hats and cotton hose, Franklin wooed Parisian salons that delighted in his rustic appearance and the tremendous eloquence he displayed in the cause of the American colonies’ independence. John Jay was less of a charmer and did not much like the French despite his French ancestry (his grandfather Pierre-Auguste Jay, a Huguenot, had fled religious persecution and settled in America around the end of the seventeenth century). But he was an experienced diplomat who sheltered behind his government’s instructions when he needed to and calmly disregarded them when he felt he knew best. He successfully negotiated the Treaty of Independence, which was signed by him, Franklin, and John Adams in Paris on September 3, 1783. This diplomatic feat won him the distinction of being one of the Founding Fathers of the young American Republic, and made him the first chief justice of the United States.

No other member of the Jay family would match John Jay’s prestige and national importance; nevertheless, thanks to him, the Jays found themselves at the summit of America’s aristocracy of merit, a position they would maintain throughout the nineteenth century and that their twentieth-century descendant Susan Mary would view with pride and a sense of obligation. The men of the family studied law at Columbia, Yale, or Harvard before becoming bankers or lawyers distinguished by restraint and lack of greed. They were occasionally sent on diplomatic missions and they all had a sense of civic responsibility, often serving on hospital or university boards or taking part in local assemblies. Several of these quiet, law-abiding citizens became known as outspoken abolitionists. A number of them chose to live in New York City or in the Hudson River Valley, where the most respectable and affluent families owned estates as vast as those of Virginia planters.

Wealth, necessary for leading a comfortable life in public service, came through marriage to powerful clans such as the Bayards, the Van Cortlandts, the Livingstons, and the Astors. In 1876, Augustus Jay, John Jay’s great-grandson, married Emily Kane, the great-granddaughter of John Jacob Astor, who had once owned entire swaths of the island of Manhattan. Attractive Emily, rumored to put rouge on her nipples like a saloon girl, made a hit in Paris, where her husband took a position as a diplomat soon after their marriage. Two sons were born: Peter Augustus in 1877 and Delancey in 1881.

Diplomatic Wanderings

Peter followed in his father’s footsteps, attending Harvard and choosing to become a diplomat. President Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of his parents, appointed him to his first post in October 1902, recommending that the young man take his job seriously.

The young man obeyed, although he never forgot to have a pleasant time. He served in Paris, Constantinople—where he played polo on the shores of the Bosporus—Tokyo, and Cairo. A few months before war broke out in Europe, he was sent to Rome with his wife and daughter.

It would be unseemly to speculate whether Peter’s marriage to Susan Alexander McCook, which took place in 1909 in New York, had been a love match. Susan came from a family famous for having sent seventeen men to fight on the Union side in the Civil War. Unlike her forebears, she had little taste for adventure or affection for daredevils and hotheads. She was a sensible and composed woman who soon became her husband’s best adviser. Two years after the wedding, their first daughter, Emily, was born. Seven years later, on June 19, 1918, in Rome, they had their second daughter, Susan Mary.

After six years in Rome, the world tour picked up again: El Salvador for a couple of insipid months, then Bucharest. Peter’s job was to defend the interests of American companies exploiting Romanian petroleum, a resource whose production had taken off after a difficult period during the war. In his free time, he escorted the Romanian queen, Marie, a granddaughter of both Czar Alexander II and Queen Victoria, who was often photographed
as a Byzantine icon dripping with jewels or as an operetta peasant girl in an embroidered blouse and head scarf. They spoke French together and rode at dawn in the woods of the queen’s country estate at Sinaia or along the tree-lined paths of Cismigiu Gardens in Bucharest.

Meanwhile, Peter Jay’s family kept to their residence, a massive and graceless house saved only by a fountain-ornamented garden in which Susan Mary toddled about, a sturdy little girl dressed in white cambric, holding on tightly to the hand of her older sister. Emily looked every inch the perfect child with her blue tunic and ringlets.

In 1926, Peter Jay was sent to Argentina as ambassador. The entire family liked Buenos Aires. At fifteen, Emily was finally free of her governess and not yet of marriageable age. She took guitar lessons and invited her friends to parties at the embassy. Susan Mary was still too little to join in, and had to be satisfied by stolen glimpses of the pink and gold fetes where young girls, voluptuous and innocent, danced with one another.

One evening in December, not long before Christmas, Emily complained of a stomachache. She was taken to the hospital, where she underwent an appendectomy. When Emily returned home, the two sisters were kept apart. Susan Mary was shut up in her bedroom as if she had been naughty. Unhappy and bored, she could hear sounds, doors opening and closing, whispering in the corridors. Her nanny stopped scolding her. Her mother did not come to supervise her evening prayers. On December 20, silence gripped the house as night fell. The following day, the noises began again. It seemed as though the house were full of people moving the furniture around. Were they getting the place ready
for a ball, Susan Mary wondered, or perhaps packing up? Only Emily could tell and Emily could not be asked.

Shortly thereafter, on December 30, the
Pan America
set sail for New York. On board were a coffin, two devastated parents, and a miserable little girl.

Alone

Immediately after Emily’s death, Peter retired from diplomatic service and did not seek another occupation. He and his wife concentrated on their loss rather than on their remaining daughter. They lived in Washington and often spent time in Maine, where they had a house in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island. They rarely went out. Peter had his books and a worsening cough; Susan had a household to run and orders to give. They pretended to be busy, hiding their unutterable grief from each other.

Susan Mary knew that her parents, her father especially, made a sincere effort to take an interest in her work and play. But they always seemed distracted, and their gaze would drift away. She tried not to dwell on this, and did her best to fill up the space left vacant by Emily’s absence. Because docility seemed to be the key to the adult universe, she gave up whims and tantrums as though they were toys she had outgrown. Formerly a headstrong child, she became yielding and considerate. The love of the young and humble can assume heroic proportions. In dedicating herself to her parents’ consolation, Susan Mary was proffering tenderness that she knew would have no effect. Emily’s name was never spoken, and Susan Mary learned to keep silent.

The lonely little girl took solace in books. She also liked playing on the shores of the icy-cold ocean, which she could see from her bedroom window in Maine. In 1932, at age fourteen, she was sent to Foxcroft, a girls’ boarding school in Virginia with a vague but admirable program of sport (riding especially), etiquette, and academic studies. She applied herself as she always had, and graduated with honors in June 1935. She had made a few friends, acquired a measure of confidence, and perfected her sense of discipline. She was ready to make her entrance into the world and do what was expected of her. Almost.

Night and Day

So the season started. A seemingly innocent notion, the season concealed a strictly regulated machine that dictated social interaction among upper-class children, ensuring that when the time came, they would be paired off according to the combined laws of attraction and the maintenance of wealth and tradition. The Great Depression had done little to reduce the expense or simplify the complexity of the rites, which remained nearly identical to those practiced in England, apart from the presentation at court.

Still, it was not an entirely disagreeable system. The mothers kept a watchful eye, the fathers paid the bills, and the children danced the night away. It was a charmed moment in life: pleasure was the only duty, and choosing among dozens of engraved invitations the only task. There were parties in blue and white tents on the sweeping lawns of Long Island, teas in Boston, dinner dances in Philadelphia, and long evenings in New York
that lasted until the pale light of dawn beckoned to bed. Night was no longer the opposite of day but the very stuff of existence. Flung into a whirlwind of pleasure, pretty debutantes flew from one city to another, floating from the first peppery sip at cocktail hour to the last drink in a nightclub. Clad in satin, cigarette in hand, they waited for love, listening to songs by Cole Porter and the heart-rending wail of Benny Goodman’s clarinet. The music seemed made for them, as did the summer nights, when champagne-tinted moonlight cast shadows into which they could stray with foolish young men.

The carousel whirled faster, then shuddered to a stop. Girls had at most three seasons to find a companion for the rest of their days. The stakes were high. Marriage was the passport to independence, the only serious career available. Beneath many debutantes’ cool exteriors flowed intense undercurrents of anxiety.

Susan Mary knew the game and accepted the rules. She was not quite sure what she wanted and did not have a plan, just a few dreams. She was not as ambitious as Marietta Peabody, though she admired her friend’s blond sex appeal, patrician allure, and the bold declaration that she was looking for a man with fortune and power. Less pleasure-bent as well, Susan Mary hoped to find some use for her quick mind and intelligence. Although her character and ideas had not pushed her to rebel or to relinquish the privilege and security of her upbringing, she could not imagine a future limited to a husband, a nursery full of children, a nice garden, and bridge parties, even if the china was from Sèvres and the dresses came from Paris. It may have been her genes, or the result of her childhood abroad: she was fascinated
by the outside world. She had a strong interest in history and a taste for current events.

Her entry onto the scene went smoothly. Life had dealt her several winning cards, including her name and her position, and she had improved the state of her hand by acquiring a social ease that was entirely her own creation. She had fought down timidity, although the death of her father in October 1933, leaving her with a mother who showed little affection, had not helped. Spurred on by a romantic desire to see and conquer the world, she had forced herself to be outgoing, to gain poise and composure. Her beauty developed, hesitantly at first, but as she lost weight, her features grew more refined. She wore her smooth, dark hair parted on the side or in the middle, in gentle, shoulder-length waves; with a lock on her forehead, prettiness eluded her. She was always carefully dressed, and although she rarely laughed, her serious and inquisitive gaze added to her charm.

Unlike some girls who were interested only in chasing men, Susan Mary also cultivated friendships with other women. There was Marietta, whose grandfather, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, had founded the famous Groton School, thus involuntarily contributing to his granddaughter’s popularity and assuring her an unending flow of young men from girlhood onward; Pauline Louise du Pont, the amusing heiress of the fabulously wealthy family that would commercialize the first nylon stockings in 1939; gentle, sweet Elise Duggan, who wrote short stories in secret and attracted men without even trying; and Dottie Robinson, who kept her homes open to guests both in New York and at Henderson House, a crenellated white mansion built in homage to her family’s Scottish origins. In the company
of these young women, Soozle (as Susan Mary was known to her friends) played bridge, golf, and tennis, went shopping, and had her hair and nails done. In 1938, she spent more time in New York than in Washington, volunteering at the YWCA and taking classes at Barnard, nothing too demanding. Serious business began at the end of the afternoon. The young men Susan Mary knew worked hard during the day—times were tough, even for Ivy League graduates—but in the evening, they went about their social pursuits with as much energy as they had put into work. Her friends were Jimmy Byrne and William Breese, who were both studying diplomacy in Washington; Curtis Prout, a medical student; and the extremely handsome Stewart Rauch, an assistant to a Democratic senator from Virginia.

Weekends were spent in elegant houses on Long Island or in Avon, Connecticut, where the Alsop clan gathered. Susan Mary got along well with the family’s three sons, who had lived and breathed politics since childhood. Their grandmother was Theodore Roosevelt’s sister, and their mother, Corinne, was first cousin to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had married her own distant cousin Franklin, the current president. Corinne was an active member of the Republican Party and had been elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1924, four years after American women had won the right to vote. She detested the politics of her cousin in the White House, but she remained proud of her Roosevelt connections.

Susan Mary most admired Joe, the eldest Alsop son. He had gone to Washington as a matter of course, and begun a brilliant career as a political reporter. Still, she had more fun with his younger brothers. Corinne would have liked her to marry Stewart,
who had not done much since leaving Yale, but it was John, the youngest son, who wrote Susan Mary teasing letters reproaching her for behaving like a disdainful Scarlett O’Hara.