Crazy Salad (16 page)

Laughing All the Way
ends with a description of Mrs. Howar’s disastrous and final experience in television, co-hosting a show with Mrs. David Susskind, and a marvelous chapter on her mother’s death. “I am enormously saddened to understand that I would not be on my way to real peace if my mother were still alive,” she writes. I don’t know whether she is on her way to real peace—I would like to have heard a little more about that—but
she
has
written a pretty good book about Barbara Howar. Which is more than I can say about her friend Willie Morris, who has also written a book about Barbara Howar this year, a novel called
The Last of the Southern Girls
. There is a point to be made here about borrowing material, and there is another point to be made about fact and fiction and the difference between them, but I don’t want to get into that. I do want to say that I read Morris’s book when I was almost finished with this column, and I note that we make some of the same points about Washington and women. I also note that he has the quote right. Washington is a city of men and the women they married when they were young. That’s how it goes.

August, 1973

Eleven years ago, shortly after I came to New York, I met a young man named Victor Navasky. Victor was trying relentlessly at that point to start a small humor magazine called
Monocle
, and there were a lot of meetings. Some of them were business meetings, I suppose; I don’t remember them. The ones I do remember were pure social occasions, and most of them took place at the Algonquin Hotel. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., we would meet for drinks there and sit around pretending to be the Algonquin Round Table. I had it all worked out: Victor got to be Harold Ross, Bud Trillin and C.D.B. Bryan alternated at Benchley, whoever was fattest and grumpiest got to be Alexander Woollcott. I, of course, got to be Dorothy Parker. It was all very heady, and very silly, and very self-conscious. It was also very boring, which distrubed me. Then Dorothy Parker, who was living in Los Angeles, gave a seventieth-birthday interview to the Associated Press, an interview I have always thought of as the beginning of the Revisionist School of Thinking on the Algonquin Round Table, and she said that it, too, had been boring. Which made me feel a whole lot better.

I had never really known Dorothy Parker at all. My parents, who were screenwriters, knew her when I was a child in Hollywood, and they tell me I met her at several parties where I was trotted out in pajamas to meet the guests. I don’t remember that, and neither, I suspect, did Dorothy Parker. I met her again briefly when I was twenty. She was paying a call on Oscar Levant, whose daughter I grew up with. She was frail and tiny and twinkly, and she shook my hand and told me that when I was a child I had had masses of curly black hair. As it happens, it was my sister Hallie who had had masses of curly black hair. So there you are.

None of which is really the point. The point is the legend. I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit. Who wrote for
The New Yorker
. Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have. I was raised on Dorothy Parker lines. Some were unbearably mean, and some were sad, but I managed to fuzz those over and remember the ones I loved. My mother had a first-rate Parker story I carried around for years. One night, it seems, Dorothy Parker was playing anagrams at our home with a writer named Sam Lauren. Lauren had just made the word “currie,” and Dorothy Parker insisted there was no such spelling. A great deal of scrapping ensued. Finally, my mother said she had some curry in the kitchen and went to get it. She returned with a jar of Crosse & Blackwell currie and showed it to Dorothy Parker. “What do they know?” said Parker. “Look at the way they spell Crosse.”

I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—
turn out to be clichés, so it was not a surprise to me to find that there were other young women writers who came to New York with as bad a Dorothy Parker problem as I had. I wonder, though, whether any of that still goes on. Whatever illusions I managed to maintain about the Parker myth were given a good sharp smack several years ago, when John Keats published a biography of her called
You Might As Well Live
(Simon & Schuster). By that time, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not, nor would I ever be, Dorothy Parker; but I had managed to keep myself from what anyone who has read a line about or by her should have known, which was simply that Dorothy Parker had not been terribly good at being Dorothy Parker either. In Keats’s book, even the wonderful lines, the salty remarks, the softly murmured throwaways seem like dreadful little episodes in Leonard Lyons’s column. There were the stories of the suicide attempts, squalid hotel rooms, long incoherent drunks, unhappy love affairs, marriage to a homosexual. All the early, sharp self-awareness turned to chilling self-hate. “Boy, did I think I was smart,” she said once. “I was just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”

A year or so after the Keats book, I read Lillian Hellman’s marvelous memoir,
An Unfinished Woman
(Little, Brown). In it is a far more affectionate and moving portrait of Parker, one that manages to convey how special it was to be with her when she was at her best. “The wit,” writes Hellman, “was never as attractive as the comment, often startling, always sudden, as if a curtain had opened and you had a brief and brilliant glance into what you would never have found for yourself.” Still, the Hellman portrait is of a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.

In one of several unbelievably stupid remarks that do so much to make the Keats biography as unsatisfying as it is, he calls Parker a “tiny, big-eyed feminine woman with the mind of a man.” There
are only a few things that remain clear to me about Dorothy Parker, and one of them is that the last thing she had was the mind of a man.
The Portable Dorothy Parker
(Viking) contains most of her writing; there are first-rate stories in it—“Big Blonde,” of course—and first-rate light verse. But the worst work in it is characterized by an almost unbearably girlish sensibility. The masochist. The victim. The sentimental woman whose moods are totally ruled by the whims of men. This last verse, for example, from “To a Much Too Unfortunate Lady”:

What seems all wrong about these lines now is not their emotion—the emotion, sad to say, is dead on—but that they seem so embarrassing. Many of the women poets writing today about love and men write with as much wit as Parker, but with a great deal of healthy anger besides. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, which Parker was often accused of imitating, Dorothy Parker’s poetry seems dated not so much because it is or isn’t but because politics have made the sentiments so unfashionable in literature. The last thing I mean to write here is one of those articles about the woman artist as some sort of victim of a sexist society; it is, however, in Parker’s case an easy argument to make.

And so there is the legend, and there is not much of it left. One no longer wants to be the only woman at the table. One does not want to spend nights with a group of people who believe that the smartly chosen rejoinder is what anything is about. One does not even want to be published in
The New Yorker
. But before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up. Most of all, I’m sorry it wasn’t true. As Dorothy Parker once said, in a line she suggested for her gravestone: “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”

October, 1973

She comes down the aisle, and the clothes are just right, Kimberly-knitted to the knee, and she walks in step with the government official, who happens to be H.E.W. Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and her face is perfect, not smiling, mind you—this is too serious an event for that—but bright, intent, as if she is absolutely fascinated by what he is saying. Perhaps she actually is. They take their places on the platform of the Right to Read Conference at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, and he speaks and she speaks and the director of Right to Read speaks. Throughout she listens raptly, smiles on cue, laughs a split second after the audience laughs. Perhaps she is actually amused. On the way out, she says she hopes she will be able to obtain a copy of the speech she has just sat through. Perhaps she actually thought it was interesting. There is no way to know. No way to break through. She has it all down perfectly. She was raised for this, raised to cut ribbons, and now that it has all gone sour, it turns out that she has been raised to deal with that, too.

The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has
any credibility—and as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe
she
believes what she is saying. They will tell you that she is approachable, which is true, and that she is open, which is not. Primarily they find her moving. “There is something about a spirited and charming daughter speaking up for her father in his darkest hour that is irresistibly appealing to all but the most cynical.” That from the
Daily News
. And this from NBC’s Barbara Walters, signing off after Julie’s last appearance on the
Today
show: “I think that no matter how people feel about your father, they’re always very impressed to see a daughter defend her father that way.”

There
is
something very moving about Julie Nixon Eisenhower—but it is not Julie Nixon Eisenhower. It is the
idea
of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, essence of daughter, a better daughter than any of us will ever be; it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six. This idea is apparently so overwhelming in its appeal that some Washington reporters go so far as to say that Julie doesn’t seem like a Nixon at all—a remark so patently absurd as to make one conclude either that they haven’t heard a word she is saying or that they have been around Nixon so long they don’t recognize a chocolate-covered spider when they see one.

I should point out before going any further that I have a special interest in Presidents’ daughters, having spent a good thirty minutes in my youth wanting to be Margaret Truman. And even back then, I knew it was not a perfect existence—Secret Service men trailing you everywhere, life in a fishbowl, and so forth. Still, whatever the drawbacks, it seemed clear that if you were the President’s daughter, you at least got to date a lot. The other attraction to the fantasy, I suppose, had to do with the fact that the role of the
President’s daughter is the closest thing there is in America to being a princess, the closest thing to having stature and privilege purely as a result of an accident of birth. It is one of life’s little jokes that both America and Britain have suffered through remarkably similar princesses in recent years: the Johnson girls, the Nixon girls, and Princess Anne are all drab, dull young women who have managed to acquire enough poise and good grooming to get through the public events their parents do not have time to attend.

—

Julie and Tricia were born just as their father was beginning public life. They grew up in Washington as congressman’s daughters, senator’s daughters, and Vice-President’s daughters. Then they moved to California to be gubernatorial candidate’s daughters, and later to New York to be Presidential contender’s daughters. After graduating from the Chapin School, Tricia went on to Finch College, Julie to Smith. There she began dating, and married—not a commoner, but a President’s grandson. (David Eisenhower, with his endless tables of batting averages and illogical articles on the American left, is the perfect Nixon son-in-law. Still, he is not stupid. Last summer, after working as a sportswriter for the Philadelphia
Bulletin
, he was asked if he had any observations on the American press. “Yes,” he reportedly said. “Journalists aren’t nearly as interesting as they think they are.”)

Marriage—which might logically have been expected to move Julie into a more removed and private existence—has instead strengthened and intensified her family connections and political role. During college, the Eisenhowers spent their summer vacations in a third-floor suite at the White House and took time off from school to campaign for Nixon’s re-election. These days, they see Julie’s parents several times a week; the Nixons often sneak off to eat with Julie and David in the $125,000 two-bedroom Bethesda
home that Bebe Rebozo bought and rented to the Eisenhowers, presumably at well below its market price.

A few months ago, Julie took a full-time job at $10,000 a year at Curtis Publishing, where she is assistant editorial director of children’s magazines and assistant editor of the
Saturday Evening Post
. She announced at the time that the children’s magazine field attracted her because it would be impossible for her, as the President’s daughter, to write for adult magazines on sensitive political subjects. An upcoming article for the
Saturday Evening Post
, however, while hardly on anything sensitive or political, is nonetheless on a topic that could not be more calculated to draw attention to her position: it is a profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who is now eighty-nine and in the seventy-third year of her career as a President’s daughter.