First Ladies (42 page)

A week after this dazzling display of democracy in action, Julia switched to elitism, limiting the guest list to a ball so severely, there were cries of anguished indignation echoing all over Washington. For access to this fete, guests needed to have influence on the upcoming vote on Texas. Julia also politicked relentlessly for the annexation among her legion of adoring congressmen and senators. “Last night,” she told her mother in one letter, “at least fifty members of Congress paid their respects to me.” Even after her marriage, she remained a consummate flirt. Men, one historian has remarked, were just so many notches in Julia’s parasol.

From New York City encouraging news about Texas arrived via Julia’s brother, Alexander Gardiner. He reported that the city’s Democratic Party had passed a series of ferocious resolutions, demanding an immediate congressional vote on Texas lest the British or the Mexicans woo the Lone Star State into their grasp. Julia decided to celebrate this good news with the ultimate gala. With the help of her sister Margaret, who functioned as the first White House social secretary, two thousand invitations went out to prominent Americans up and down the eastern seaboard and into the far reaches of the West.

An astonishing three thousand people showed up. They were somehow jammed into the bulging White House to ogle Julia and her court and a veritable roundup of other beauties she had corraled for the occasion. “We were as thick as sheep in a pen,” Margaret Gardiner said. Julia, in a white satin dress embroidered with silver, covered by a matching cape looped with white roses, was at her zenith. The Marine Band in scarlet uniforms played polkas, waltzes, cotillions. Julia and Madame Bodisco, the Russian ambassador’s equally beautiful wife, stopped the party when they joined in a cotillion with ambassadors from Austria, Russia, France, and Prussia. Eight dozen bottles of champagne were consumed, along with wine by the barrel. By the end of the evening, the huge chandeliers of the East Room had used up a thousand candles. Someone congratulated President Tyler on the sensational success of the affair. “Yes,” he quipped. “Now they cannot say I am a President without a party.”

Less than a month later, Congress passed the annexation bill, and Tyler handed Julia the pen with which he signed it as a testament of
her role in the victory. She told her mother she would always wear “suspended from my neck the immortal gold pen with which the President signed my annexation bill.” Note the personal pronoun. Julia had no doubts about who was responsible for this immense addition to the Union.

When my father carried Texas, a crucial state in his comeback victory in 1948, I like to think “Cousin” John Tyler and Julia were looking down, smiling. There is not much doubt that they were Democrats at heart, a fact that became dramatically evident in their post-White House years.

—

A
T FIRST GLANCE
, F
RANCES
F
OLSOM
C
LEVELAND SEEMS TO HAVE
been little more than a latter-day Julia Gardiner Tyler. In reality, there are so many differences between them, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say the only things these two women had in common were their youth and beauty. To begin with, their husbands were as different as two men can possibly be.

Geniality was the essence of John Tyler’s southern style. Most of the time, Grover Cleveland was about as genial as a rudely awakened grizzly bear. His temperament seemed permanently chilled by the howling blizzards that frequently bury his native city of Buffalo, New York. A thick-necked, massive man who threatened the scales with his 250-pound bulk, he made his way in politics with blunt talk and unwavering, uncompromising honesty.

When he won the Democratic nomination for President in 1884, after a successful stint as New York’s governor, his Republican opponents promptly nailed him with a smear that would have ruined almost any other politician. The would-be President had a ten-year-old illegitimate son. Republican flacks gleefully circulated a chant:
Ma, Ma, inheres my Pa? Gone to the White House ha ha ha
.

Instead of issuing irate denials, Cleveland told his aghast supporters to admit everything. He had been involved with a New Jersey widow named Halpin, who apparently was also familiar with several of his married friends. When she gave birth, Cleveland, a bachelor,
accepted responsibility to save his friends from embarrassment. He had supported the child and his mother with a monthly stipend ever since. The novelty of a politician so forthrightly telling the truth enchanted the American electorate. With the help of high unemployment and some blundering Republican remarks about Irish-Catholic Democrats, Cleveland won the election, entitling his gleeful supporters to throw the Republicans’ campaign chant back in their dismayed faces.

During his first year in the White House, the bachelor President worked eighteen hours a day to prove to the American people that they had elected the right man. For formal state dinners and occasional lighter entertaining, he enlisted his unmarried sister, Rose, as his hostess. An intellectual who taught English literature and had written a book on the novelist George Eliot, Rose was an ardent feminist who was as blunt as her brother. Male guests left the White House reeling from lectures on the oppressed state of women. Aside from the opportunity to proselytize for her sex, Rose found the White House boring and spent her time on receiving lines conjugating Greek verbs in her busy brain.

Meanwhile, Cleveland was battling Congress over who was in charge of the country. Ever since the lawmakers almost impeached Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, the legislative branch had assumed virtually total power in Washington. But behind and beyond the raging political warfare and the President’s social isolation, romance was simmering. Again, the situation had all the ingredients of scandal. The young woman happened to be Grover Cleveland’s ward.

Frances Folsom was the daughter of Oscar Folsom, Cleveland’s Buffalo law partner. Cleveland was so close to the Folsoms, he had bought little Frances her first baby carriage. Oscar Folsom had been killed in an accident when Frances was twelve, and Cleveland had become the administrator of his estate. The welfare of Folsom’s widow and daughter had been one of his major preoccupations ever since.

Only a few close friends and family members realized that the relationship between Frances and the forty-eight-year-old President had
slowly shifted from the paternal to the passionate. Rose Cleveland later admitted she knew her brother’s intentions even before he entered the White House. But Cleveland waited for Frances to graduate from Wells College in 1885 before formally asking her to marry him. His proposal was made by mail, but he later admitted that he had said some very romantic things to her in the East Room during a visit to the White House before he wrote the letter.

Frances said she would marry the President, but first she wanted to tour Europe. Cleveland acquiesced, though he grew a bit grumpy over her decision to spend nine months there. Such considerations were overshadowed by his desire to forestall ugly gossip and innuendo in the press by keeping their engagement a secret until the eve of the wedding. Cleveland was painfully aware that many people considered him a coarse, lumbering oaf, “a brute with women,” as his predecessor Rutherford B. Hayes had indelicately put it during the campaign.

Secrecy almost unraveled when Cleveland sent Frances an affectionate bon voyage telegram and the Western Union operator slipped a copy to a reporter friend. But the reporter identified the object of Cleveland’s affection as Frances’s mother! With such rumors swirling, Frances herself was not exactly discreet. In England she wrote a friend, telling her she was engaged to the President; the friend opened the letter in a room full of people and became so excited she read it aloud.

Cleveland and his bride-to-be got a foretaste of things to come when Frances’s ship reached New York on May 27, 1886. The President went up to greet her and incidentally review the city’s Memorial Day parade. A small army of police was needed to hold back the crowds in front of Frances’s hotel. The President himself was almost mobbed when he arrived to see her. But to Cleveland’s immense relief, the popular mood was vibrant with approval. His tough stance as the people’s spokesman versus a Congress dominated by special interests, his call for Congress to stop the exploitation of the working man by big business, had won him wide support and softened his rough image. The country was delighted that their forthright President had found a wife.

At the parade, the bands saluted Cleveland with specially selected tunes, such as “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.” Toward the end of the march, one regiment’s nervy musicmen swirled by the reviewing stand playing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s new operetta,
The Mikado
, “He’s Going to Marry Yum Yum.”

The lucky few who attended the wedding got handwritten invitations from the President. Colonel William H. Crook, who had served as Lincoln’s personal bodyguard, described Frances’s arrival at the White House on the morning of June 2, 1886: “She tripped up the steps and swept through the great entrance like a radiant vision of young springtime… from that instant every man and woman [on the staff] was her devoted slave, and remained as such.”

The White House was crammed with flowers from the conservatory—literally hundreds of potted plants on tables and mantels, plus ropes of fresh cut flowers draped along the moldings. At 6:30
P.M
. the guests arrived, and at 7:00 every clock in the mansion began to chime, while across Washington church bells joined the chorus, and cannon in the Navy Yard roared a twenty-one-gun salute. The Marine Band, led by their eminent conductor, John Philip Sousa, struck up “The Wedding March,” and the President and his bride descended the grand staircase.

Tall and full bosomed, Frances Folsom looked stunning in a dress of heavy corded satin, draped in almost transparent India silk, and fringed with orange blossoms. After a reception in the East Room and dinner in the State Dining Room, she and the President rode through cheering crowds to Union Station for a one-week honeymoon in Deer Park, in the mountains of western Maryland. There they soon discovered what would become the chief torment of their White House years—the prying eyes of the nation’s reporters.

Cleveland already had a low opinion of the press. Early in his term, he had written to a magazine editor, declaring that in no other country in the world was “newspaper lying” so widespread. Now the reporters infuriated the President by camping around a perimeter of the honeymoon cottage and spying on the presidential couple with field glasses and telescopes. No detail was too small for their inquisitive
eyes. They described every change of outfit by the First Lady and even checked out the grocery deliveries to give their readers imaginative descriptions of what the First Couple was having for dinner. The irate President raged that they were making American journalism “contemptible.”

Returning to the White House to take up her official duties, the soon-to-be-twenty-two-year-old First Lady enchanted everyone. She never tired of standing in receiving lines and shaking hands with her guests. But she had to learn the hard way there was a limit to how much pressing the flesh could take. Massage and some tutoring in the art of the political handshake were necessary to keep her on the job. The stern, pugnacious Cleveland seemed to take on a softer aura in his wife’s presence. He beamed as she melted roomfuls of visitors and told her mother in his gruff way that Frankie, as she was called, “would do.”

Unlike the glamorous Julia Tyler, who adored playing queen in the White House and reveled in displays of presidential power, Frankie had no patrician pretensions. Instead of galas, she preferred simple receptions that were open to a broad spectrum of the public. One of her most popular innovations was Saturday afternoon receptions specifically for working women, who could not attend the weekday doings at the White House. Her popularity soared, and “Frankie Cleveland Clubs” sprouted in many urban Democratic wards. Soon her hair and dress styles were being imitated by women all over the country, and not a few manufacturers used her likeness in ads for their products.

Cleveland was inclined to denounce Frankie Clubs and, for that matter, every other kind of women’s club; in his ultraconservative view, women should stay home and raise their children instead of running to meetings. But Frankie persuaded him to be more tolerant. Under her influence, his famous irascibility declined noticeably. She also coaxed him into shortening his eighteen-hour workdays and selecting more tasteful clothes.

The President remained at war with the press. Instead of staying in the White House, where privacy was practically impossible, he startied
everyone by buying a house on the Potomac, Red Top, where he and Frankie lived most of the time, commuting to the White House for public purposes only. (The area has since become one of the loveliest sections of Washington, Cleveland Park.) No one seemed to object to this idea, which strikes me as dreadful. The press, cut off from almost all access to the First Lady, had their revenge when Cleveland ran for reelection.