Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (21 page)

“I don’t know. Wasn’t he spending all his time thinking about rich people? Not the kind of thing to celebrate here, if you know what I mean. We already receive too much criticism for not doing enough for the common man, or whatever it is our enemies think we should be doing, bowing down and scraping the ground for whatever we find down there, I suppose. Eating ants, if need be. Now, Elvis isn’t a poor man, you can be sure of that. Maybe we should ask him to contribute to the campaign. Let me talk to Bebe about that. He’ll know what’s right.”

T
he four characters of Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie
are a mother, her daughter, her son, and a “gentleman caller.” In his notes describing them, Williams puts forth some of their inherent contradictions. Amanda, the mother, has “endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her slight person.” Her daughter, afflicted with a bad leg, “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.” Both female characters, damaged, live in their own realities. Tom, Amanda’s son, who narrates, also embodies contradictions: he is a poet who works in a warehouse. Imagine being Jim O’Connor, invited to dinner: the daughter went to high school with Jim and has always secretly loved him; the mother, pining for the past and eager for any suitor; Tom, who yearns for independence, escapes these loonies any time he can and goes to “the movies.”

Mrs. Nixon read this play to Julie, who was in high school, in 1965, though it was first performed twelve years earlier, so she might have already been familiar with it. Plays that dwelled on
people’s psychological aberrations were not usual then; selecting characters who had—as we would say now—arrested development were not usual, either. The palpable subtext of sexuality was pure Tennessee Williams: it could be read as a play that symbolically suggests incest. Tom, carelessly throwing his coat, breaks his sister’s precious glass animals (hymen?), while Mom is muddled enough in her thinking to suspect that every man is her no-good, absent, drunken husband. She loves men, yet fears them. It’s a Women versus Men play, with men representing wildness but the main female character wilder in her imaginings than any drunken lout.

Such extremes! Mrs. Nixon’s own conflicts were her internal debate about what price she might be willing to pay in order to have freedom. She turned down a doctor’s proposal of marriage. She left Whittier (and Mr. Nixon) in 1938, and when she returned, she did not call him. Yet once she decided on domestic life, she was by all accounts fiercely devoted to her family. Her daughters married young—though she could not have seen the future the night she sat reading to Julie. Gentlemen callers—one wants them, yet when they come to call, they bring with them their maleness. RN, though he played football, also played violin. Though he courted her with eloquently worded letters and what he thought of as unique gifts, he is remembered, along with LBJ, as among the most profane of our presidents. Though he wished freedom for her and for her to indulge her wanderlust, he repeatedly ran for public office against her wishes, and her travels took her to whatever event was listed in her daily schedule.

At the time she read to her daughter in 1965, it looked as if RN might have given up on politics. Defeated for governor of California, he went to New York to work in a law firm. Unlike Amanda Wingfield’s husband in Williams’s play, he never ran away from his family but rather put his own desires first, which interfered
with their ability to function autonomously, unobserved by the press and the public.

What might Mrs. Nixon’s reaction have been to
The Glass Menagerie
? She is quoted as saying, “I don’t daydream, and I don’t look back. I think what is to be will be, and I take each day as it comes.” That’s a big
it
—much determined by her husband’s choices, which, like so many women of that era, she went along with. In the play, which the playwright conceived of as happening in memory, he used the device of words projected onto a screen that commented on the action by echoing or augmenting it: “Ha!”; “The crust of humility”; “Terror!” Mrs. Nixon needed no projected observations; the day’s news about her husband often gave her that. No “Take that!” appeared over the helicopter that took them from the White House after his resignation, but she didn’t know that was in her future. She had decided in her youth that she would not view her world as what might have been, but as holding great potential: she would accomplish her goal to finish college; she might be an actress; she would be a teacher; she decided to become a wife and mother. She had obvious intellect, skills, and talent, and nothing in Williams’s play suggests Amanda Wingfield had those attributes. Amanda is passive, and believes in the fairy tale; Mrs. Nixon was active, and believed in working hard to create her own scenario. Both had an impenetrability, though. Both retained information that conflicted with their ideals. Amanda projects herself onto her daughter, while her daughter is a realist who sees what she is up against a bit cryptically, but pretty clearly. The Nixon daughters’ identities so absorbed their father’s determination that Tricia once wrote a note to her father urging him to go ahead and run again for public office because “if you don’t run, Daddy, you really have nothing to live for.” (The canary urged a return to the mine, because the person carrying the cage really wanted to reexplore it.)

Did Mrs. Nixon identify with a Southern belle dreamer? No. Did she sympathize with a mother doing everything possible to marry off her daughter? She, herself, would probably have done no such thing; also, she would have counted her blessings that her daughters, one brunette, one blond, both petite and feminine, had no reason not to be viable future wives. What did she think of the undercurrent of frustrated sexuality? Maybe best just to accept that someone was at “the movies” if that is what you are told. And the symbolism of Laura’s glass animals—the unicorn being a particular favorite? Mrs. Nixon graduated cum laude; therefore, it seems likely that she would have understood the symbolism, perhaps known the legend of the unicorn, at least have realized that the unicorn was a fantasy that embodied things we needed to project onto it. Living in a fantasy, though? Not acceptable. The gentleman caller? She must have looked at him with some suspicion—not because he was calculating, because he is not, in the play. A bit naïve, but that’s sometimes expected of men. Jim is already “taken,” it turns out—he has a steady girlfriend. He kisses Laura, so might that be some beginning—a way for her to have better self-esteem? (He says he wishes this for her.) Or is he more drawn to her than he knows? Yes, there’s the suggestion of that. Does he, perhaps, simply pity her? No, it seems more a question of unacknowledged attraction, or the fact that so many men do get away with misbehavior. Did the playwright’s homosexuality figure in the play? (Both Williams and his sexually frustrated narrator are named Tom.)

Such a sad play, really: everyone caught by a lack of resources, whether they be financial or self-delusion as self-protection. Someone wanting to escape his constraints was limited by society’s belief, along with his mother’s, that, being a man, he would have to take care of his sister and also, by implication, of the other female in the family. What did you do, in those days, if you worked a pointless
job—a man’s job—but were nicknamed Shakespeare because you also loved poetry? He’s complex, but he gets the fewest lines. But wait: he has his own power because he gets to narrate. Yet that’s another self—a responsible self who has to tell the story, because the women could not; the narration also has to consider social constraints, as did the playwright. And no one ever answers him. In a variation of the device John Dos Passos used in
The 42nd Parallel
(1930), Williams adds to the play “real” information, in the form of real
Chicago Tribune
headlines—either stating the emotion in the scene (
“Où sont les neiges d’antan?”
), or giving us an image to correspond with a character’s internal state, or to interject irony (“Screen image: The cover of a glamour magazine”) that makes us contextualize what is happening differently. In
The Glass Menagerie,
memory is lit up onstage; it’s as if we move forward in the present, while the past and the future light up the insides of our heads with their own commentary. Though artificial, the screen images are meant to approximate some physical state; like Freud—just starting to be popular—Williams wanted to deal with unstated inner conflicts.

The play is unsettling and was likely to have upset Mrs. Nixon in some ways. Did she read well, as the actress she had formerly been, or a bit haltingly, as a mother reading a curious text to a teenage daughter? Also, did she pause, slowed by her own awareness as a person familiar with inner conflict?

Amanda: “You modern young people are much more serious-minded than my generation. I was so gay as a girl!”

Mrs. Nixon (shrugging to avoid the implications of so many questions): “I guess I’m vindicated for going to the school of hard knocks.”

At this point—her husband having been defeated for the presidency by John F. Kennedy—how much of her own life might Mrs. Nixon have seen in this claustrophobic play about Amanda and her
daughter, Laura? Mrs. Nixon, who prided herself on being pragmatic, would not have easily identified with a dreamer. Amanda is not the sort of character who’d pull herself up by her bootstraps, or even wear anything as mundane as boots. I imagine the character in ballet flats: a slipper of shoe, worn for comfort by non-ballerinas, the laces existing in romantic recall, even when the shoe is abbreviated.

But what woman would not see something of herself in this character, even if she was more functional? Less harmful. She is a repository of some of society’s expectations, almost a cauldron of those things brought to boiling point, though we are certainly meant to see her more as an exaggeration than as representative of a type: a particularly misled, possibly somewhat piteous individual, whose self-involvement ultimately punishes everyone in her orbit.

To try to answer my own question, I pose another: How often do we judge characters, rather than understanding them?
Madame Bovary
is much read, much taught, not because we approve of adulterers (though we often do), but because this book is about an individual whose surprisingly usual desires we might understand: a person caught as much by her own temperament as by society’s rules. Who can read the sentence without feeling herself or himself shiver, when her lover’s coach lights the darkness, streaking away from her as she stands in a room with her husband, the image indelibly etching her lover’s betrayal? There is no fainting in
The Glass Menagerie,
but many of Laura’s beloved glass animals end up broken nonetheless—ruined hopes, but also perhaps punishment of her mother by proxy?

1. Mrs. Nixon throwing horseshoes in the Rose Garden. An insomniac, Mrs. Nixon sometimes played a late-night game of horseshoes with the Secret Service agent assigned to her (L). Partially visible, with “Brontosaurus bone,” King Timahoe (R).

2. An avid reader, Mrs. Nixon peruses a book by Norman Mailer.

3. Mrs. Nixon (L) greets schoolchildren touring the White House. David Eisenhower (R) adjusts his tie, to the amazement of this first grader.

4. Mrs. Nixon (L) and Rose Mary Woods (center) play Monopoly on a folding table in Mrs. Nixon’s study. H. R. Haldeman (R) carries a Webster’s dictionary from Mrs. Nixon’s quarters.

5. The Nixons on Valentine’s Day, holding a five-foot-high cardboard heart made by children at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

6. Entertaining Mrs. Khrushchev, Rose Garden, 1959. The two women grew close.

7. Sister Mary Alphonse Cochilla (L), Mrs. Nixon (center), and Julie Nixon Eisenhower (R). Rear: Alexander Butterfield (L), leaning toward Henry Kissinger (R).

8. A walk near the Jefferson Basin to view cherry blossoms with old friend Helene Drown (L), Tricia Nixon (R), and Reverend Billy Graham, partially visible, holding leash of King Timahoe.

9. New York City, Lord & Taylor, 1980.

10. First-grade honor student Jane Hill (L) joins Mrs. Nixon for “tea,” served by White House pastry chef, Heinz Bender (R).

11. President Nixon (L) stands to applaud at Kennedy Center. Mrs. Nixon (R), rising.

R
omance is a funny thing to try to figure out, though it’s probably easier when it’s someone else’s romance. It’s hard to understand sometimes why you
are
drawn to someone. Your father thinks our marriage was meant to be. Impulsive of him, saying he’d marry me the first time we met! But at least there weren’t two people being impulsive, because I needed a bit more time. I didn’t want to give up my freedom. I’ve heard that one of those movie actresses gets a big department store in Los Angeles to open up late at night so she can shop. They do it, because when someone famous likes your store, chances are more and more people are going to show up. Do you think we should ask the Secret Service to rouse the sales staff at Woodies and turn on the lights for you and me, and we could try out some of the new fall styles and give your father a big surprise with the news we’d been midnight shopping?

We should have some handouts for our special tour. Some inspirational thoughts from the Founding Fathers, mimeographed? Maybe an inspirational saying from Jefferson or Washington? Some people get cuff links or other things from your
father’s desk drawer, but this group won’t be going in, so maybe we should have a nice little memento for them. Maybe a letter opener with the presidential seal and inside the envelope a few smart things said by Lincoln, or General Eisenhower. Maybe it would be good to remind them of a few things men of distinction thought to say, rather than their spending their time listening to Bob Dylan.

They say he took his name from the poet. Well, I ditched Thelma. When you think about it, so many people changed their names as a prelude to living their lives another way.