American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (19 page)

During the following summer, walking through the pine forests of Northeast Harbor, Susan Mary came to a decision, the most agonizing of her life. Had Elise’s death made her more aware of the passage of time? Had Joe uttered one cruel word too many? She realized that he would not change, and that if she did nothing, she would eventually fall apart. She had to protect herself. As it was, she lived in fear and felt herself shrinking under her husband’s harsh criticism. Her self-esteem, not strong at best, was relentlessly shaken, and her insecurity grew as, unsuccessfully, she tried to fend off attacks that left her dispirited and full of doubts. Strong emotions had never appealed to her; she preferred them watered down with gentle banter. Instead, she was caught up in continual and exhausting confrontations that she made worse by playing them over and over in her head. In addition to the suffering caused by her marriage, she found herself forced into a state of perpetual self-analysis, an exercise she disliked as she equated it with self-indulgence.

“I really do think that we are lovers, otherwise we wouldn’t be so miserable about hurting each other.”
³⁰
This heartrending admission, made a few years earlier, still held true, but Susan Mary was no longer content with such tortured satisfaction. She hated fuss, so she left quietly. The
Washington Star
of September
26, 1973, published a brief announcement noting the separation. Susan Mary soberly declared that she was grateful for the twelve years she had spent with her husband and that she hoped to see him often in the future. “Joe is a wonderful bachelor and a wonderful stepfather,” she wrote.
³¹
Even while publicly declaring the failure of her marriage, she hid her wounds under a veil of ironic affection.

So Susan Mary took her life into her own hands. She moved into an apartment rented to her by a friend, perched in the tall fortresslike complex called the Watergate. There had been a lot of talk about the Watergate since June 1972, when five men working for Richard Nixon’s reelection committee were caught in the building trying to burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters. Their arrest had not harmed Nixon, who was reelected with relative ease. Over time, the president’s role in the break-in leaked out. In May 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee hearings began. Susan Mary found them “horribly fascinating,”
³²
but wanted to believe that the president had not known what was going on. However, it was revealed that a hidden system for recording conversations existed within the White House itself, and that the president was frantically doing all he could to hold up investigations.

The only good point of the apartment was its view of the Potomac, but Susan Mary always kept the curtains drawn because she thought the window frames too hideous. She also disliked the white walls, which she covered in paintings and the Watteau engravings of monkeys that she and Bill Patten had bought in Paris. The entryway was hidden behind a screen, and the chintz sofas and French furniture warmed up the three little rooms where Susan Mary
received her guests. She told them calmly she was starting afresh, and said she missed nothing but her Georgetown garden. Her friends, who were not surprised by her separation from Joe, admired her nerve and almost believed in her high spirits.

It was not clear whether Susan Mary’s unrelenting self-control hid deep suffering, or whether her delicate coolness kept her safe from the disorder of more violent emotions. Sometimes, in letters, the mask would fall and reveal something of her distress. “I am infinitely glad to be clearing out of here,”
³³
she wrote to Marietta before joining her in Barbados in December. For once, the bougainvilleas, tropical punch, and relaxation beneath the white coral arches did nothing to restore her energy. “I feel like a piece of old wet flannel.”
³⁴
It took a stay in Florida on the plantation of her Whitehouse cousins and a few days at Marietta’s house in New York to help her recover her strength and start reading again. Toward the end of January 1974, the psychoanalyst she had been talked into seeing found her in better form.

She had no regrets about leaving her husband, who was also shaken up by the separation, but she could not help addressing the subject in letters to her son, concluding, “Having loved him and fought for him was a waste of fourteen years.”
³⁵
This negative appraisal contrasted with the pathetically gushing tone of her letters to Joe himself. Before leaving for Barbados, she had thanked him for his Christmas present, a gouache by Hubert Robert, wishing that “despite the immense worry and sadness our marriage has given you, you will remember the happy times. There are so many.”
³⁶
Two months later, during which they saw and called each other regularly, she confessed her nostalgia: “Darling, I write to celebrate our wedding anniversary because it
was such a good show—it lasted a long time and gave great pleasure to many people—above all to me. Looking at your high ceilings the other night, comparing them to my claustrophobic apartment, I felt how fortunate I had been, how much I owe to you, and how much I then and now loved you. Circumstances did not aid us, stars were crossed, but my marriage vows of February 16 hold.”
³⁷

Holed up in an apartment she disliked, Susan Mary was confronted with painful loneliness. She still loved the man she had left, and felt burdened with the defeat of the separation for which she partially blamed herself. In spite of all this, she managed to begin a new life. She found strength in her friends and in the things that accompanied her in her Watergate exile, particularly an old typewriter and bundles of letters. The past had called out to her, welcoming, familiar, and infinitely malleable. She had decided to transform her life into a story. It was a metamorphosis that would be her salvation and greatest accomplishment.

From Paris with Love

The idea had come from Marietta. She and Susan Mary would gather their fifteen years of correspondence and offer it up to the public in celebration of their friendship. The book would have the added benefit of giving Susan Mary something to do and would add another jewel to Marietta’s crown, proving she was as talented in literary matters as she was in politics and diplomacy. (Marietta had done a great deal for the Democratic Party before going on to represent the United States at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under the Kennedy administration.) They went through old trunks and shoe boxes, and Marietta asked Ken McCormick, senior editor at Doubleday, to sample their letters. He read for fifteen minutes in the library of Marietta’s New York town house while the two women smoked nervously in the room next door. Convinced by what he had seen, he told them to get started. A contract would arrive in the following day’s mail.

The real work began early in the summer of 1973. Susan Mary
and Marietta had to unearth, sort out, and reassemble their correspondence. Both had kept almost everything they had written between 1945 and 1960, when Susan Mary was living in France and Marietta in England. Mrs. Jay also gave them the letters her daughter had sent her from Paris, which would be published as though they had been written to Marietta. As her friend had predicted, the discipline and pleasure of daily work calmed Susan Mary’s frayed nerves and broken heart. Sitting at her felt-covered bridge table, she forgot the ugly apartment and let herself be carried back to her youth, that new and wonderful country one rushes through carelessly, vowing to return. With melancholy joy, she rediscovered the days of Bill’s illness, the times when Duff used to take her on his lap, when gowns on loan from Dior waited in their tissue paper for her to make them bloom with triumphant flare. Without rewriting them entirely, Susan Mary shook out letters, removing old secrets and the most embarrassing cases of her naïveté as a wide-eyed American girl arriving on the Continent. She fretted over her banal style, frivolous preoccupations, and imprecise storytelling. Her editor, McCormick, regularly received anguished phone calls.

“I’ll never make it. I’m going to throw it all in the Potomac.”

“Do as you like. But I suggest you think twice and let me know how it’s going next week.”

Evening seemed to come all too quickly. With the help of her French maid, Mimi, she would clear off her worktable, light the candles, and prepare to greet her friends, the Bruces, Muffie and Henry Brandon, Carter Brown, Brooke Astor, Senator Heinz, and young Dallas Pell. She wanted her parties to be as exciting
and successful as those she had hosted on Dumbarton Avenue. So she smiled encouragingly, listened intently, and had coffee served at the table to keep conversation going. The guests would leave around eleven, remarking on how well she was coping on her own. Her task completed, she could return to her beloved ghosts.

In 1974, almost all of Susan Mary’s time was taken up by the book. Occasionally, she would pull away to listen to the rumors about Nixon’s eagerly awaited resignation. Even Joe, who had always been careful never to weaken the president’s position, had come to think that stepping down was the best thing Nixon could do. Still, Susan Mary was more interested in the events of the 1940s and 1950s than in current affairs. She read dozens of books on the period to make sure her notes and comments would be impeccable. Marietta had given up her share of the project, and the entire load now lay on Susan Mary’s shoulders. In April, Doubleday sent her an advance of five thousand dollars, which she divided between her children. By November, the book was finished and Susan Mary decided to reward herself with a trip to Laos, where Charlie Whitehouse had been serving as American ambassador for a year and a half. She invited her sister-in-law Tish Alsop who had been a widow since Stewart Alsop’s death in May, treating her to the journey. At the end of February 1975, the two women set off, intent on leaving their worries and solitude behind.

The ambassador’s residence in Vientiane had a swimming pool and tennis courts, but Tish and Susan Mary had come to see something of the country. Charlie took them to meet General Vang Pao, the enemy of the Communist Pathet Lao and the CIA’s faithful ally, who was based in Long Tieng, a mountain
military fortress accessible only by air. The diminutive general was waiting, standing at attention in a khaki uniform decorated with three gold stars.

“Can’t you just imagine him on horseback next to Genghis Khan?” Susan Mary whispered to her sister-in-law.

“Shush, he speaks English.”

The general actually spoke a sort of soldier’s French that was supplemented with expressive grimaces and gestures. He signaled to Charlie to sit next to him, while the ladies sat on a sofa with the first of the general’s six wives. His officers stood behind him. They all drank warm whiskey that made Susan Mary’s head spin. She watched lunch being prepared: large plates of white rice swarming with flies. As long as they serve it up quickly, she thought. Unfortunately, the general launched into a violent monologue, railing against the prime minister, Souvanna Phouma. “Ah, Ambassador, Souvanna is nothing but a woman, a frail little poplar tree all atremble even when there is no wind. You see, for us it’s a life or death situation, and there’s an 85% chance that we’ll end up dead. Let’s eat.”
¹

The ordeal was not over. Like Levin in
Anna Karenina
, Vang Pao wanted to show his guests the agricultural progress that had been made among the local Hmong tribes under his command. The group boarded a beat-up helicopter with no doors or seat belts that the general piloted himself. The ancient machine lifted off with difficulty before sputtering high above the mountain valleys, where the mist rose like steam off a cup of tea. Susan Mary took refuge at the back of the cabin and shut her eyes, while Tish remained bravely seated at the edge of the precipice, working out
whether her life insurance would cover her children’s college education. Charlie mentally drafted their obituaries.

The next day’s activities were less adventurous. Susan Mary and Tish toured Ban Houayxay, an outpost on the Mekong River. Martinis in hand, the two women sat watching the river. The sun was setting. A refreshing evening breeze carried the gentle sound of the nearby temple bells, and it was hard to believe that the Vietcong had passed through the sector only a day before. For the rest of the trip, when she was not flying around in a helicopter, Susan Mary was at the hairdresser’s. There were a number of official dinners and lunches, and she wanted to honor the reputation of her cousin Charlie and not look windblown and unkempt among the silky Laotian princesses. She managed somehow, and Tish thought she looked as neat and elegant as usual, and far more relaxed. At the end of two marvelous weeks, they parted ways. Tish went back to the United States, and Susan Mary continued traveling, passing through Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Tehran, where her friends the Helms were posted. Finally, she stopped in London on her way to Washington. A month later, Saigon fell and the Pathet Lao seized power in Laos, driving out the royal court in Luang Prabang as well as the unfortunate Hmong who had trusted the United States.

On her return, Susan Mary resumed work on the book. Doubleday suggested a cover she described in a letter to Joe as “lovely and romantic, a collage which I think you will like. We owe (forgive me—I still say ‘we’) much to the blurbs which will be on the cover.”
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Arthur Schlesinger, Douglas Dillon, David Bruce, the actress Kitty Carlisle, and the popular author Emily
Kimbrough had all contributed their endorsements. These were printed with a photograph of Susan Mary in serious mode, her brow furrowed like a disapproving governess. “Those stern brown eyes,” as Bill Patten used to say about his young wife. The book was dedicated to Mrs. Jay out of a sense of filial duty, but she was the most grateful to Joe and Marietta. Joe had supported her literary endeavors and allowed her to sign the book with the name Alsop, something her editor had insisted on. Marietta had not felt the slightest resentment after having chosen not to appear as a coauthor and was planning a reception in New York in September to celebrate publication. As to the book’s actual content—“I am not ashamed,”
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said Susan Mary when she received the first proofs. She even let herself show unusual self-satisfaction, repeating the compliments she had received (“David Bruce thinks my letters are better than Janet Flanner’s”
⁴
) and comparing herself favorably to her old schoolmates, who “seem to have done so little with their potentialities. Rich, charming, everything going for them, now I flee when I meet one of them on the street.”
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Obviously, Marietta was not part of this depressing category, and Susan Mary continued to sing her praises. “You have done more with your life than any of our contemporaries. You are the star of our time.”
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