Crazy Salad (15 page)

“Okay,” said Mrs. Johnson. “They’ve got a contest now, Crystal Sugar Name a Sauce. It has pineapple in it.”

“I don’t think I won that,” said Mrs. Finnegan, “but I’ll show you what I sent in.” She held up the napkin and this time what she had written made sense. “Hawaiian More Chant,” it said.

“Oh, you’re clever,” said Mrs. Johnson.

“They have three more contests so I haven’t given up,” said Mrs. Finnegan.

—

On Monday morning at exactly 9 a.m., the one hundred finalists marched four abreast into the Hilton ballroom, led by Philip Pillsbury, former chairman of the board of the company. The band played “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven,” and when it finished, Pillsbury announced: “Now you one hundred winners can go to your ranges.”

Chaos. Shrieking. Frenzy. Furious activity. Cracking eggs. Chopping onions. Melting butter. Mixing, beating, blending. The band perking along with such carefully selected tunes as “If I Knew You
Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” Contestants running to the refrigerators for more supplies. Floor assistants rushing dirty dishes off to unseen dishwashers. All two hundred members of the working press, plus television’s Bob Barker, interviewing any finalist they could get to drop a spoon. At 9:34 a.m., Mrs. Lorraine Walmann submitted her Cheesy Crescent Twist-Ups to the judges and became the first finalist to finish. At 10 a.m., all the stoves were on, the television lights were blasting, the temperature in the ballroom was up to the mid-nineties, and Mrs. Marjorie Johnson, in the course of giving an interview about her house to the Minneapolis
Star
, had forgotten whether she had put one cup of sugar or two into her Crispy Apple Bake. “You know, we’re building this new house,” she was saying. “When I go back, I have to buy living-room furniture.” By 11 a.m., Mae Wilkinson had burned her skillet corn bread and was at work on a second. Laura Aspis had lost her potholder. Barbara Bellhorn was distraught because she was not used to California apples. Alex Allard was turning out yet another Honey Drizzle Cake. Dough and flour were all over the floor. Mary Finnegan was fussing because the crumbs on her Lemon Cream Bars were too coarse. Marjorie Johnson was in the midst of yet another interview on her house. “Well, let me tell you,” she was saying, “the shelves in the kitchen are built low.…” One by one, the contestants, who were each given seven hours and four tries to produce two perfect samples of their recipes, began to finish up and deliver one tray to the judges and one tray to the photographer. There were samples everywhere, try this, try that, but after six tries, climaxed by Mrs. Frisbie’s creation, I stopped sampling. The overkill was unbearable: none of the recipes seemed to contain one cup of sugar when two would do, or a delicate cheese when Kraft American would do, or an actual minced onion when instant minced onions would do. It
was snack time. It was convenience-food time. It was less-work-for-Mother time. All I could think about was a steak.

By 3 p.m., there were only two contestants left—Mrs. Johnson, whose dessert took only five minutes to make but whose interviews took considerably longer, and Bonnie Brooks, whose third sour-cream-and-banana cake was still in the oven. Mrs. Brooks brought her cake in last, at 3:27 p.m., and as she did, the packing began. The skillets went into brown cartons, the measuring spoons into barrels, the stoves were dismantled. The Bake-Off itself was over—and all that remained was the trip to Disneyland, and the breakfast at the Brown Derby … and the prizes.

And so it is Tuesday morning, and the judges have reached a decision, and any second now, Bob Barker is going to announce the five winners over national television. All the contestants are wearing their best dresses and smiling, trying to smile anyway, good sports all, and now Bob Barker is announcing the winners. Bonnie Brooks and her cake and Albina Flieller and her Quick Pecan Pie win $25,000 each. Sharon Schubert and two others win $5,000. And suddenly the show is over and it is time to go home, and the ninety-five people who did not win the twenty-fourth annual Pillsbury Bake-Off are plucking the orchids from the centerpieces, signing each other’s programs, and grumbling. They are grumbling about Sharon Schubert. And for a moment, as I hear the grumbling everywhere—“It really isn’t fair.” … “After all, she won the trip to Mexico”—I think that perhaps I am wrong about these women: perhaps they are capable of anger after all, or jealousy, or competitiveness, or something I think of as a human trait I can relate to. But the grumbling stops after a few minutes, and I find myself listening to Marjorie Johnson. “I’m so glad I didn’t win the grand prize,” she is saying, “because if you win that, you don’t get to
come back to the next Bake-Off. I’m gonna start now on my recipes for next year. I’m gonna think of something really good.” She stopped for a moment. “You know,” she said, “it’s going to be very difficult to get back to normal living.”

July, 1973

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up. Is that how the saying goes? Something like that, anyway. All those tidy little summations of local phenomena—California is fine if you’re an orange; first prize one week in Philadelphia, second prize two weeks in Philadelphia—turn out, after close inspection, to be even more accurate than they seemed at first hearing. But the one I wanted to talk about is the one about Washington.

I don’t know a great deal about life in Washington for women—I spent a summer there once working in the White House, and my main memories of the experience have to do with a very bad permanent wave I have always been convinced kept me from having a meaningful relationship with President Kennedy—but that doesn’t stop me from making generalizations about the place. Because it has always seemed obvious that life for women in Washington combined the worst qualities of the South and small-town life. Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate
rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip. A married woman with any brains and personality at all is faced with a Hobson’s choice: she can be her husband’s appendage, and pay that price—and we have Joan Kennedy as the classic example of a woman who has. Or she can be a crazy lady.

I should clarify what I mean by crazy lady. In my youth—which ended about eight years ago—I occasionally had a date with someone who was very straight. Which is to say, square. In most relationships, I tend to be the straight one, cautious, conservative, not crossing on the Don’t Walk, but whenever I was confronted with someone even squarer than I was, whenever I was confronted with a relationship where the role of the crazy person was up for grabs, I would leap in, say outrageous things, end the evening lying down in Times Square with a lampshade on my head. I wasn’t a patch on Zelda Fitzgerald—I would never have leaped into the Plaza fountain for fear of ruining my hair—but I was in there doing my damnedest.

The crazy lady I have been thinking about apropos of all this is Barbara Howar. Mrs. Howar is not really crazy in any context where real craziness exists—in New York, she would just be another outspoken, somewhat bitchy woman. But Washington is a city that is an all-purpose straight man: you don’t have to be a terribly funny joke to get laughs in Washington, and you don’t have to be a terribly crazy person to seem about as loony as they come. Just jump into the Supreme Court fountain. Or refuse to go off with the ladies after dinner. Or have an affair. That’s about all it takes.

Barbara Howar, who has written a book about her experiences in Washington,
Laughing All the Way
(Stein & Day), was a socialite who hooked up with Lynda Bird and Luci Baines in some inexplicable way having to do with wedding trousseaus and became a social light in the Johnson Administration. In an era not noted for
its sophisticates, she became notorious for her sharp-tongued remarks, some of which were occasionally mistaken for wit and some of which were actually witty. Then she was dumped shortly before Luci’s wedding, in a tacky and hilarious episode which confronted her with a true moral dilemma: should she warp her six-year-old daughter for life by withdrawing her from the role of flower girl in the ceremony, or warp her for life by letting her go on with it? After resolving this dilemma (she let her go on with it) and living through a decent period of social ostracism, Mrs. Howar emerged once again to resume her role as the town’s Peck’s Bad Girl.

As she recalls in her memoir, “I was filled with an uncontrollable desire to shock—to say or do anything that would raise voices and eyebrows or boredom’s threshold. I had a natural ability to alienate people I found dull. I would rudely cut short any matron lady who dwelled too long on her wonderful children, her indispensable housekeeper, or her husband’s unheralded political abilities. I once interrupted a woman deep into her monologue about the great Lone Star State with, ‘If I hear one more exaggeration about Texas, I’m going to throw up on the Alamo.’ I became incautious in my description of Texas habits, asking one gentleman sporting a hammered-silver belt studded with ersatz stones: ‘Did you make it at summer camp?’ And to a Dallas lady in reference to the Tex-Mex delicacy she had proudly served for dinner: ‘Did you get this recipe off the back of a Fritos bag?’ ”

I liked
Laughing All the Way
—it happens to be far more charming than what I just quoted would indicate; it also happens to be fun to read. But I was surprised to find it as fascinating as I did, because what Barbara Howar has written, and I don’t think it was unintentional, is almost a case study of a kind of woman and a kind of misdirected energy. And while I’m not sure any lesson or moral
can be drawn from it—or if it can, I’m not about to do it—her floundering attempts to make a life and identity for herself are genuinely, and surprisingly, moving.

Barbara Howar came to Washington just out of finishing school and the South and went to work on Capitol Hill. She was pretty and blond and energetic and, as we used to say in high school, popular. As she writes, “I never wearied of flying on private planes to the Kentucky Derby with groups that included Aly Khan, of first nights of Broadway musicals.… But the tedium of clerical work dulled the excitement of my social life. I started doing bizarre things—my personal indicator of unrest—painting mailboxes shocking pink, leaping fully clothed into the Supreme Court fountain. One day I woke up disposed to do the only thing I had not yet tried: marriage.” She married very well: her husband was a builder, heir to an Arab fortune, and she entered into the life of being his wife, working at charities, being photographed at luncheons, having parties and a family. Then 1964 came along, and because it was the thing to do that year, she went to work for the campaign of President Johnson.

It is altogether possible that had Barbara Howar married someone she was more capable of being an appendage of, none of what followed would have happened. Or it would have happened much later. In any event, she went off as Lady Bird Johnson’s hairdresser on the campaign swing of the South, met a Johnson aide with whom she had an affair, and charmed the President to the point that he was soon holding her hand (and falling asleep) during White House movie screenings and whirling her about the dance floor at State functions. “I was
that
woman dancing with
the
President …,” Mrs. Howar recalls. “It never occurred to me that I could distinguish myself in more admirable fashion.”
Women’s Wear Daily
began to follow her everywhere,
Life
magazine profiled her, and
Maxine Cheshire watched as she danced on a tabletop in a white dress with gold chains she said “cut into my tender young flesh … just a little number the Marquis de Sade whipped up for me.…

“There simply was no shutting me up. I had to tell every newspaper and magazine that Mrs. Johnson, a lady who spent every waking minute planting trees in ghettos and sprinkling tulip bulbs around settlement houses that had no plumbing, was ‘off base’ with her Beautification Program, that it was ‘like buying a wig when your teeth are rotting.’ I had to say in print that Mrs. Johnson’s rich New York friends ‘would be better advised to donate their money to countless endeavors like fighting street crime, and that to celebrate their philanthropy I would gladly wear a bronze plaque saying:
TODAY I WAS NOT RAPED OR MUGGED THROUGH THE KIND GENEROSITY OF THE LASKER/LOEB FOUNDATIONS
.’ ”

The affair with the Johnson aide continued and became a full-fledged Washington scandal; she left her husband and went off with her lover for a week in Jamaica. “In the sultry, alien surroundings of the Caribbean,” she writes, in one of the more melodramatic sections of the book, “harsh reality became larger than my fantasy of finding peace by changing marriages. I became morbidly depressed for the first time in my life. I missed the children, my home, everything familiar and comfortable. I was melancholy and homesick, maudlin in my confusion, I wanted something to make me happy, something to give me reason not to care that half my life was over and that I had no real zest for finishing out the rest. Guilty and restless as before, I saw the future now as even more menacing. I wanted it all and I wanted out. It was the woman’s primal feeling of being trapped, unable to live without marriage because it was all I knew, but incapable of projecting myself happily into more of the same. My anxieties grew. I had doubts about who I was and what I wanted to be. Why was I even in Jamaica?” At
about this moment, Mrs. Howar’s reveries were interrupted by a group of detectives, who burst in on her and the Johnson aide, ripped the strap on her nightgown, and took pictures. Mrs. Howar returned to Washington, reconciled for a time with her husband, and was promptly dropped by the Johnsons.

At this point, Barbara Howar’s story became a morality tale. Her son gets spinal meningitis and almost dies. She finally leaves her husband. She develops a social conscience through a relationship with Bobby Darin, the singer, and becomes a star on a local television news show, where her standard operating procedure was to fling her newly acquired set of facts on life in the slums at her guests. “It was a long while,” she writes, “before I learned that if there was anything worse than a bigoted keeper of the status quo, it was a recycled socialite with a newly aroused public conscience.” Mrs. Howar complains, in what are straight women’s movement terms, that her remarks on the air were not taken seriously because she was a woman. “If my male counterparts made strong critical statements, they were ‘blunt’ or ‘forceful’; similar candor from television women is ‘cutting,’ ‘catty,’ and ‘bitchy.’ ” She is right about the problems—though probably not in her own case. A typical moment in Mrs. Howar’s television career was this remark, made as a criticism of the space program’s all-white personnel: “If N.A.S.A. can train a monkey to operate the controls of a rocket, they can train a black man.”