American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (4 page)

Several times a year, Susan Mary would take the night express train to Bar Harbor. The following morning, she woke up to the ocean, dotted with white sails. She would give her mother a kiss and hurry off to the club, where the waiters set up tables and umbrellas on the lawn at noon. Ladies sipped aperitifs while young, tanned bodies lay around the pool below, supplying gossip for their elders. Protected from the sun by small round sunglasses and folded newspapers over their heads, Susan Mary and Marietta would try again and again to talk their friend Bill Blair out of his Republican and isolationist opinions. Vibrant, eloquent, the two girls looked lovely, Susan Mary very slim and her friend so spectacular in a black two-piece bathing suit that she turned the heads of all the men who had not gone sailing. Picnics were organized, as were golf tournaments, boat outings, or cocktails at the Peabodys’ house in Northeast Harbor. Friends came up from Boston and New York and immediately fell into the happy indolence of youth. On Saturdays, there were dances at the club and everybody smoked too much. Later in life, Susan Mary would recall impossibly beautiful summers when in fact the fog often covered the mountains and turned the ocean gray.

In 1939, Susan Mary decided to earn money with her writing. She moved in with her uncle Elliot Cross, the husband of her mother’s sister, dear Aunt Martha. One of Susan Mary’s friends, Barbara Cushing, who would later marry CBS founder William S. Paley, had been hired by
Vogue
as a fashion editor because she was photogenic and had great beauty, style, and connections.
Barbara, whom most people knew as Babe, helped Susan Mary write an enthusiastic article on the glorious future that was in store for open-toed shoes, after which
Vogue
offered her a job as a receptionist for twenty-six dollars a week.

During the summer of 1939, the New York World’s Fair gave people a chance to admire the city’s most recent architectural marvels like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Babe and Susan Mary posed for a
Vogue
photo shoot in evening gowns, hanging in the air from invisible harnesses with the fair as background. It was a well-paid gig for amateur trapeze artists.

But things got even better. One evening that same summer, while Marietta was away, her fiancé, Desmond FitzGerald, invited Susan Mary to dinner at the Maisonnette Russe, a fashionable restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel. At the end of the meal, he signaled to an old Harvard buddy to join them. In a flash, any feelings Susan Mary might have had for other men vanished like rabbits scattering at the blast of a shotgun. Her eyes lit up as they met the stranger’s gaze.

Bill Patten

Everybody loved Bill, and not just out of pity. Asthmatic since childhood, Bill had been pampered by his parents, William and Anna Patten, both Bostonians from good families—and in Anna’s case, rich. When he was fourteen, Bill’s parents sent him to Groton, where he met Joe Alsop, who was born a year after him, in 1910. Neither boy corresponded to the athletic ideal espoused by the school’s venerated British models: Bill was sickly and Joe much too fat. Still, Groton’s severe teachers and even
Reverend Peabody took a liking to young Bill Patten. It was the same story at Harvard. Whereas Joe, sweaty and short of breath, earned his stripes through clownery, storytelling, unabashed snobbery, and brilliant intelligence, Bill just smiled the winning smile that made two deep dimples appear at the corners of his mouth. Though Harvard claimed to have a more democratic and intellectual atmosphere than other universities, social success was still considered as important as academic grades, and this was measured by admittance into the elite final clubs. Both Bill and Joe were admitted to the Porcellian Club, Harvard’s most selective, making them equals to former member Theodore Roosevelt and giving them a slight advantage over Franklin, whom the Porcellian had passed over.

By the time Bill met Susan Mary he was almost thirty. He had a group of close friends, and was as asthmatic as ever. Professionally speaking, he worked for a Boston brokerage firm and had done nothing worthy of reproach, but he did not have much in the way of a future. Choices made with personal happiness in mind rarely seem reasonable, and quite a few people pointed out the drawbacks of marrying Bill, which Susan Mary had immediately wanted to do. Well-wishers told her she was too young, and that Bill was too sick. Charles Francis Adams, a friend of Bill’s from Harvard, took her aside at a party and explained that Bill had to marry for money because his poor health forbade him from earning it. This line of reasoning hardly shocked Susan Mary. She was aware of the laws of matrimony but she was not going to let them stop her. She could allow for the fact that Bill ought to be looking for an heiress, but if that was not his intention, she was not going to stand aside. She saw no reason to give up the things about Bill
that made her happy: his good humor, courage, kindness, and the concern he showed for her. She felt as though Bill would always let her pass through a doorway first, that he would always be on her side in times of conflict. He would not be a guide or a tutor, but a dear and tender friend. She had considered the match from every angle, and had found that there was more complexity to Bill than his gentle temperament initially let on. As far as his health was concerned, she thought she could cure him.

The mothers made their inspections. Susan Mary was invited to meet the formidable Anna at her house in Lenox, Massachusetts. (Anna had remarried a bishop, Monsignor Davies, after William Patten’s death in 1927.) In turn, Susan Jay came to New York to meet her daughter’s beau. Having cared for her own husband during his asthma attacks, she had doubts about Bill’s possible recovery, but Susan Mary and Bill were determined to marry and the rest of the family stood behind them. The date was set for October.

Marietta’s wedding to Desmond FitzGerald in Northeast Harbor gave Bill and Susan Mary a chance to rehearse, for they were both in the bridal procession. Bill was not at his best, thin and stiff in his jacket, looking like an elegant scarecrow with hollow cheeks and a set smile. His fiancée wore a sea-green dress in draped jersey with a high collar and nasturtiums in her hair that made her look prim and silly. There were torrential rains and the guests spent the entire evening huddled around the radio listening to the news. The German army had invaded Poland the previous day.

A few weeks later, on October 28, 1939, in the little white chapel on his Long Island estate, Susan Mary’s uncle, Delancey
Jay, led her down the aisle. She and Bill had lost little time, for they knew, like Marietta and Desmond and indeed their entire generation, that war was looming. They needed to hurry if they wanted to live and love before it began.

A Date Which Will Live in Infamy

For their honeymoon in November 1939, the Pattens rented a cottage at Cuernavaca, near Mexico City. It was covered with balconies and had a pool, three bedrooms, and a cascading series of five different gardens. From the sitting room, there was a view of the violet hills and snow-capped volcanoes in the distance. Susan Mary played at being the lady of the house, and discussed menus with the cook, who patiently endured her dictionary Spanish and served exquisite meals. Bill went riding, played golf, and shot pigeons. Susan Mary could hear his breathing improve. The little city of Cuernavaca, with its pink houses and tile roofs, was known for having a warm and gentle climate. On weekends, it filled up with foreigners and Mexicans leaving the capital to get some fresh air. Susan Mary enjoyed having guests for dinner and wrote her mother candid and lighthearted letters almost daily. She was proud to get by so well on her own. Amid the serenity of those few months in Mexico, she still tried to find out as much as she could about the developing war, which she found very strange indeed.

After the shock of Hitler’s brutal attack on Poland, the American people were convinced that he could not face down the British naval blockade and France’s impenetrable Maginot Line. It was also thought that the difference between German and
Russian railroad gauges would preclude the continuation of the German campaign on the Eastern Front. The April 1940 invasion of Denmark and Norway, followed by that of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France the following month, soon cast aside these illusions. Congress authorized the draft of all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, and President Roosevelt sent fifty destroyers to the British. Although the vast majority of Americans hoped for an Allied victory and praised England’s courage in the air battle with Germany that had begun in August 1940, they were not ready to get involved. A significant number of politicians were even actively campaigning against American intervention, together with influential groups, such as the America First Committee, whose supporters included Charles A. Lindbergh, an admirer of the Luftwaffe, who thought Great Britain should make peace with the Axis powers. Roosevelt and his Republican adversary, Wendell Willkie, were careful about their statements on the European war during the presidential campaign in the fall of 1940. They both declared their support of Great Britain by all means except armed intervention, promising to keep the United States out of the war.

American involvement grew during 1941 with the passing of the Lend-Lease Act, placing seven billion dollars at the disposition of the British, followed by the proclamation of the Atlantic Charter between Roosevelt and Churchill. But it was the Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, that finally led Roosevelt to request and obtain the declaration of war on Japan from a nearly unanimous Congress. In turn, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11. The massive American war
machine quickly rolled into motion and nearly ten million men were called up, trained, and sent into combat.

Bill’s asthma made him a category 4F, which meant he was unfit for military service. He refused to move to Arizona as his doctors had recommended, and looked for a way to earn a little money so as to be less dependent on his mother. He also wanted to serve his nation out of uniform. First, he worked on the presidential campaign for the Republican candidate, Willkie, who was considered more supportive of the Allies; then, after Roosevelt’s victory over Willkie, he found a job organizing civil defense for the city of Boston. In November 1942, thanks to his mother-in-law, he was hired by the State Department in the service of Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state to Cordell Hull and a former colleague of Peter Jay’s. The Pattens left Boston for Washington. Susan Mary was glad to return to the capital and relieved that Bill could finally stop feeling useless and comparing himself unfavorably to his enlisted friends. Joe Alsop was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in Hong Kong, Charles Adams was in the marines, and Desmond FitzGerald had been drafted as a simple soldier.

In November 1944, the State Department offered Bill a job as an economic analyst for the foreign service with a salary of thirty-eight hundred dollars a year. His first assignment was to the American Embassy in Paris.

A Voyage to Paradise

Bill left for Paris in January 1945, and Susan Mary went to stay with her mother in Georgetown while she waited for clearance to join her husband, no simple matter in wartime. Their time apart dragged on. Susan Mary was eager to begin her new life as a diplomat’s wife in a city where both her father and grandfather had once served America’s interests. She was also looking forward to a greater degree of financial and psychological autonomy. Mrs. Jay always seemed to disapprove of her daughter’s decisions, and her generosity inevitably came with tiresome lectures about thrifty housekeeping. For Susan Mary, Paris was a promise of independence and peace, a haven far from her meddling mother, a link with the family’s past.

The itinerary for the journey eventually arrived, indicating a date, time, and location that had to be kept secret until the last minute. At ten in the evening on March 31, 1945, a friend dropped her off on a pier in New York. She boarded the long military ship with two suitcases, a handbag, a typewriter, a hatbox, and a few orchids. The next morning, her ship joined twenty others to form a convoy on the high seas under the protective escort of destroyers and Catalina seaplanes. Rules were strict. Passengers had to drink their sherry out of toothbrush mugs, dine at five in the afternoon, and wear life jackets all the time. Still, the officers were perfect gentlemen, and Susan Mary rather enjoyed obeying them, and disobeying them too. One night, she stepped out of her cabin when the convoy was under fire from one of the last German attacks and was soundly reprimanded.

Twelve days later, Susan Mary disembarked at Southampton and took the train to London, where she discovered the grim reality of war. Everywhere she turned there were houses that had been blown to bits, gutted buildings, barbed wire, and craters full of black water. Squadrons of bombers continually flew overhead on the way to Germany. The people were poorly dressed and underfed, but kept smiling in the knowledge that victory was near; restaurants, bars, and nightclubs were full of officers and pretty women. Susan Mary was delighted to see her English friends after so long and excited at the thought of being reunited with Bill. Flattered by the attention she received from several men in uniform, she fell under the spell of London’s giddy atmosphere.

This happiness was somewhat dampened by the news of Roosevelt’s death. On the few occasions she had visited the White House at the invitation of young Franklin Jr. and Ethel du Pont,
Susan Mary had not been impressed by the late president. She had always hoped, in vain, to hear interesting revelations from the statesman who had stood up to Wall Street and fascism. One evening, in December 1942, shortly after the beginning of the Allied Operation Torch in North Africa, Roosevelt began talking about the French admiral Darlan while preparing martinis. He said that he agreed with Eisenhower: Darlan was a rascal, albeit a useful one. This promising opening was dropped when they were called to the dinner table. Roosevelt withdrew behind a humorous, impenetrable façade and told dull stories about sailing, his passion. The Pattens went home disappointed. But when Susan Mary found herself sitting on a bench in St. James’s Park on the morning of April 13, she felt very far from home and mourned the death of her president. Nobody knew much about Harry Truman, the man who would take his place.