Personal History (6 page)

Although she never quite said so, and often claimed the contrary, she clearly thrived on the range of new and varied people she met. My parents, separately and together, attended dinners, lunches, and teas almost nonstop—including the famous Ned and Evalyn McLean Sunday lunches for eighty or a hundred people entertained by a full orchestra, held at Friendship, the McLeans’ “country” place on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, where McLean Gardens is located today. The names she mentioned in her diary escalate in both prominence and interest as the months mount, starting with Cissy Patterson, then known as Countess Gizycki. She fascinated my mother, who wrote of her: “Pugnose, red hair, a ready wit and charm, what more can a woman have? As she is extremely feline I shall see to it that I do not get scratched but with that in mind I intend to see what there is in it.”

As she had done in Paris, my mother rapidly got to know extraordinary people: Baruch, Brandeis, Frankfurter, who took her to see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Elihu Root, and Charles Evans Hughes. She met and, as she said, tried to impress H. G. Wells. She began a flirtation with Shrinivasi Sastri, a delegate from India to the nine-power peace conference
that took place in Washington in 1922. She is very self-analytical in the diary, and mentions feeling not always mentally at her best, “but when I like people I have a silly wish to glitter that no one really could satisfy.”

She also got to know Alice Roosevelt Longworth and her husband, Nick. She was always ambivalent about Mrs. Longworth, and Mrs. L., as we all always called her later on, returned the feeling. My father and Mrs. L. became good friends and, later, bridge-playing companions, but my mother kept her distance. “What a brilliant but sterile mind!” she wrote after one meeting with her. “It is exactly like her father’s and helps me to understand T.R. perfectly.… The thought of her undoubtedly makes my winter look more interesting.” After one party that they both attended early in 1920, my mother described Alice as having been in a “very carnal sort of mood. She ate three chops, told shady stories and finally sang in a deep bass voice: ‘Nobody cultivates me, I’m wild, I’m wild.’ ” Mother kept halfway admiring her, though, while also constantly criticizing her. “There is something depressing about her very keenness,” she wrote.

Despite her seemingly happy immersion in the social whirl, her diary is peppered with critical comments, both about the city and its people: “Washington is not in the least intellectual. Of that there is no doubt whatever”; “Roosevelt [Franklin—then Assistant Secretary of the Navy] is very pleasant but his wife [Eleanor] like all officials’ wives is terribly aware of her position”; “I came home very blue as the dinner party as a form of human intercourse seems to me very poor indeed.”

She may have scorned dinner parties, but she took great delight in the “breadth and depth” of her life. At one point she exclaimed, “At last je m’en fiche de Mt. Kisco. I really believe that complex is eliminated”—the only reference to the fact that the social snobbery there had hurt her.

What the diary also indicates is that motherhood was not exactly Mother’s first priority. She rarely mentioned any one of us children individually. I appear in the diary for the first time by name (or by initial, I should say) in February 1920, two and a half years after my birth: “The babes (Bill and K) take some of my time this week. At breakfast yesterday Euge said: ‘K will be a big woman.’ Bill (4½): ‘She isn’t going to be a woman, she’s going to be a lady.’ K: ‘No I’m not, I’m going to be a woman.’ ”

There are sporadic mentions in the diary of visits to Washington by the children, or of parental visits to New York. These references focused on how much we were learning, and our development under the care of Powelly and Mrs. Satis N. Coleman, a teacher who later became well known for her program for the early musical training of children—she believed that music education should make a contribution to character building, home life, and society. My sisters played the violin, which she helped them learn by first teaching them to make violinlike instruments
out of cigar boxes, and I did things like tap on glasses filled with varying amounts of water. In December of 1918, my mother noted, “The children delighted me with their progress and their happiness under Mrs. Coleman’s influence.” When Mother visited New York, she would often have a few people in, and we—especially Flo and Bis—would dance or perform for them in some way. Mother seemed to view this kind of thing as the essence of a happy childhood, making passing comments about everybody being pleased with the children and “their unconscious joy,” or that everyone was “enchanted with the accomplishment, the promise and all pervading atmosphere of childish happiness.” These remarks typify her talent for seeing things as she wanted them to be.

In the absence of a mother’s day-to-day affection, we grew devoted to Powelly. She supplied the hugs, the comforting, the feeling of human contact, even the love that my mother did not. She was kind and wise and, above all, warm. Powelly was always there, sensibly solving our problems and salving our hurts, even if her methods were somewhat unusual.

My mother didn’t much believe in doctors—I hardly ever saw one through most of my youth—and Powelly was a devout Christian Scientist, so illness wasn’t acknowledged by her. If we said we had a tummy ache or a cold, she would say, “Just know it’s going to be all right”—and off we’d go with any disease or even a fever. I did stay home from school briefly with the mumps and was permitted to lie down on the couch for half a day. Another medical problem was a sprained finger the size of a good cigar from a basketball bouncing off the end of it. My mother sent for her masseuse. The lovely Swedish lady took one look and suggested a doctor, who put it in a splint. My freshman year in high school, I had a loud, racking cough the entire winter. This was overlooked at home but much discussed in a deafened school as I barked my way through the year. Finally, toward spring, my mother decided that a weekend away in Atlantic City would be beneficial, so she dispatched me with the governess, Mademoiselle Otth, to a hotel on the boardwalk for a cure. A cold rain fell the entire time, and we ran out of money. Only thirty years later, when I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, was it observed by the doctors that the scars on my lungs indicated I had had a previous attack. Whatever it was, I got over it.

Luckily, I have always had rugged good health and a really strong constitution. The happy result of having Powelly’s philosophy embedded in me was that, if I did get anything, I, too, tended to disregard it, and have always been able to keep going through minor afflictions. Year after year went by with perfect attendance at school, and no doubt many germs spread generously around.

When you outgrew Powelly, there was Mademoiselle Otth, who was somewhat disorganized but did her best and meant well. She was sweet
but unable to ride herd on us as we grew older. Another much-loved influence on our early years was the family chauffeur, Al Phillips, known as Phil. He was our friend, colleague, supervisor, and protector.

After the first year in Washington, my mother went with us to Mount Kisco for the summer; then she returned to Washington to live in Mrs. George Vanderbilt’s house, “a much more charming milieu than that of last year.” She again decided to leave the children in New York, fearing the Washington winters. She wrote her justification in the diary: “The influenza has been raging all over the country with very high mortality, but here in W. [Washington] the conditions were disgraceful. People died right and left from pure neglect, and bodies were lying about everywhere because there were no undertakers and no grave-diggers to dispose of them.”

She returned to a new round of people and dinners. And she helped start a ladies’ lunch club and wrote of the first meeting in 1920: “We discussed ‘What is the most outstanding figure developed by the war?’ Mrs. Hard supported Lenin and Mrs. Harriman, Hoover. The feelings flew on occasion.… We decided to discuss at the next meeting ‘Decided that the Russian blockade should be lifted.’ It was great fun on the whole and among the women are the most intelligent in Washington.” Alice Longworth was pointedly omitted from the invitees.

Making himself helpful in Washington, my father had moved through the War Industries Board and the War Savings Committee, and in January 1919 he had been made chairman of the War Finance Corporation. When its work came to a halt for a while in May 1920, my parents briefly moved back to New York one last time, but Washington, with its allure of politics, had captivated them both. They were drawn to its openness and what she called “the tenseness of interest that the life here has for us.” In New York he toyed with buying the Missouri Pacific Railroad, or joining Adolph Ochs, who invited him to come on
The New York Times
on the business side, but that side alone didn’t interest him.

When the Republicans were elected in 1920, there was talk of my father’s returning to Washington. After a congressional struggle precipitated by the opposition of much of Wall Street, which viewed it as too much government interference, the War Finance Corporation was revived and my father was appointed to it by President Harding and was elected its managing director in March of 1921. This new appointment finally made my parents realize they would be in Washington for some years, so, when they returned to Washington that fall, we were at last brought down to live with them.

My mother threw herself into the social and political scene with renewed vigor, having found that she had to re-establish their position after their absence and, of course, a changed administration. For instance, she
made three hundred social calls in a relatively short period of time, which meant leaving calling cards with one corner turned down, signifying that she had personally left them. She despised doing this, saying she did it “not only because of Eugene’s much wider associations, but because I have to put us back on the social map.… This game takes more persistence and courage than anyone will admit.” She confided to her diary that “I cannot hide the fact that my sympathies are deeper, my interests more serious than those of most of these women.” In fact, that was true; they were.

As for me, when I reached the age of four, Washington became my home and remained so forever. At first, we moved into a large, dark, red-brick house on Connecticut Avenue, described by my mother in her diary as a “big, old-fashioned barn.” She added: “The children are happy in their semi-country life, and we are all glad to be living together again.” My earliest memories are of this house, where I was quite content. The house was a sprawling Victorian mansion with a stained-glass bay window in the dining room. It was rented from the Woodwards of the Woodward and Lothrop department-store family, the Lothrops having built an equally large stone house a block away. The land around the house extended the length of the block, and the yard became a playground for the whole neighborhood.

One of the earliest transactions I had with my father about the future took place in this Connecticut Avenue house when I was about eight. He kept asking if, when I grew up, I would be his secretary. I had no idea what a secretary was or did, but the whole idea struck me as distasteful. At the time, my father himself seemed to me a rather remote and strange male figure whom I liked from a distance but thought very different. My answer was a constant and firm no. Although I had an awareness that this was a tease, I knew it was something I didn’t want to do. However, I had a bank in which you inserted nickels, dimes, and quarters, and when it reached the vast sum of $5.00 it would spring open. I had been collecting coins for months on my tiny allowance, and finally I needed only one nickel to have all this vast wealth at my command. When I asked my father if he would give me a nickel, he said, “Well,
now
will you be my secretary?” I agreed. I sold out for a nickel. My father would occasionally refer to this future, making me slightly puzzled and anxious, but I never thought of reneging on the bargain and was always referred to as his future secretary.

I
N LARGE FAMILIES
, it seems it is hardest to be either the first or the last child. That was certainly true in ours. Florence, the first—conceived on the honeymoon trip and born in 1911—was the only Meyer girl who was beautiful in the classical sense. Flo was both smart and vulnerable. Her tastes were artistic and literary: she could often be found reclining
with a book in her hand. According to my mother’s ideal, Meyer girls were supposed to be competitive and athletic. Flo was neither. She always wore a large picture hat on the tennis court to indicate that she wasn’t seriously trying. Instead of sports, she immersed herself first in music, later—much too late, as it turned out—in dance, making her professional debut in Max Reinhardt’s
The Eternal Road
in 1935. Despite my parents’ interest in and support of her dancing, Flo never received from them the emotional support she needed while growing up. She had an especially difficult time with my mother, no doubt because of Mother’s inexperience with motherhood and her lack of interest in it. An attempt to elope at sixteen was foiled by the chauffeur, Phil. Throughout my childhood, Flo was a distant though appealing figure to me. For Flo, I didn’t exist until we were both grown up.

Whereas Flo may have bent, however unwillingly, to my parents’ wishes, Bis—born two years after her—lived in a state of constant rebellion. “My whole life was malefaction,” Bis later told me. “I was against adults.” She resented the power our parents had over her and met power with power in whatever way she could—and she found a number of ways. As she said many years later, “I led an illicit life to a rather large degree.”

Bis had an expression—“you haven’t lived until …”—that both got her into trouble and led her into great adventures. Her life-sustaining escapades included attending a burlesque show and a wrestling match. When she was very young, Bis decided she would not have lived until she had hocked something, so she pilfered a necklace from my mother’s room and asked Al Phillips to drive her and a friend across the Potomac River to Rosslyn, Virginia, which was then a dusty semicountry crossroads with a strip of pawn shops. “My good man, what will you give me for these jewels?” Bis demanded authoritatively of the bemused pawnbroker. “Little girl,” he replied, “I suggest you return that necklace to your mother.” When Bis and her friend turned around, they found Phil doubled over with laughter at the door.