Hollywood (11 page)

Harry had been well pleased by Jess’s organization of the Madame Marcia meeting. Until then, the Duchess had never really taken to the idea of Warren and herself in the White House. The Senate suited her just fine. Warren, too, she said; and he would echo her. But what Warren said and what he thought were often two different things, according to Harry Daugherty, who knew Warren—or W.G., as he called him—best of all.

Twenty years earlier, when Daugherty had begun to realize that his own career would never go much higher than that of a party chairman, he had decided to conduct a high-powered career by proxy. When he had met the remarkably handsome Warren Gamaliel Harding early one morning in the front yard of Richwood’s Globe Hotel, some fifteen miles from Marion, he had decided there and then that this handsome young state legislator and newspaper publisher was going to go all the way to the stars, or so Daugherty now told the story, and as he did, W.G. would half-smile that smile of his and stare off into space, eyes half-shut, head half-tilted. Jess had known both of them long enough to have heard the story become more and more elaborate, as W.G. had risen, in a zig-zag way, with a lot more zags then any of them had anticipated. After two terms in the state senate, W.G. had zigged into the lieutenant governorship of the state; served one term; went back to editing the profitable Marion
Star
, with considerable help from the Duchess, who was inexorable when it came to collecting monies due. Six years later, in 1910, W.G. zagged disastrously when he ran for governor and was defeated. But two years later Daugherty had reversed the Harding fortunes when he maneuvered the Republican magnates into letting Warren give the nomination speech for William Howard Taft at the party’s convention. In a matter of hours, the handsome, sonorous, gray-haired, black-browed young politician was a national figure; and two years later, in 1914, he was elected to the United States Senate in the first election where senators were chosen not as the founders had intended, by state legislators, but by the people themselves. Now Daugherty was scheming to place his friend in the White House. What W.G. thought of all this, deep down, was a mystery to Jess. What the Duchess thought was often voiced: “I’ve seen the inside of the White House. There’s no taste or refinement there, which is maybe the fault of the Wilsons. Anyway, how can a body stand having all those people around all the time? Why, you can’t turn around you don’t see somebody lurking back of a potted palm, his eye on you.”

The Duchess was now in the room, busily straightening up, which meant
throwing cigar stubs into the grate of the coal-fire. “Where are you two going to go meet Colonel Roosevelt?”

“Mrs. Longworth’s house. Your favorite house, after the White House.” Daugherty enjoyed teasing the Duchess. As she had no sense of humor, she could tolerate quite a bit of joshing at her own expense.

“I’ve still never set foot there. Nor she here. And. I.” The Duchess spelled it out. “Am. The wife. Of the Senator. From Ohio. And Nick Longworth’s just a representative of a lot of no-good Germans from Cincinnati. Which he wouldn’t be today if my Warren hadn’t helped him get back in after he got licked in ’12, as well he should’ve been, the lecherous drunk.”

“Well, he
is
in Congress. And Alice is still the President’s daughter …”

“
Ex
-President. So stuck up. With her painted face. And cigarettes. And,” the Duchess’s thin mouth became a wide slit rather like that of a letter-box, “her cocaine.”

Jess sat bolt upright. This was what he lived for. The real inside about everything. Whaddaya know? was now answered in spades, “How do you know that?”

“The dentist.” The Duchess looked very pleased with herself. “I go to him. She goes to him. He prescribes it for her. He told me. She’s had that bad jaw ever since a horse kicked her head in. Well, he gives her cocaine, and she asks for more and more and tells him she’s a hopeless addict.”

Harry sighed. “Speaking as a lawyer, Florence, if the guilty party admits guilt like that, she isn’t really guilty. But just making fun, which is her style.”

“There is nothing, Harry, that I don’t know about dentists,” was the Duchess’s stern if somewhat tangential response.

United States Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding, Republican of Ohio, entered the room, carrying his frock coat over one arm. He wore bright red galluses and a stiff detachable collar, snowy white in contrast to his olivetinted face, whose regular features were ever so slightly blurred, giving satisfaction to those who enjoyed believing the never entirely discredited legend that the Hardings were a Negro family that had only recently, in the last but one generation, passed over to white.

“Harry. Jess. Duchess.” The deep voice rolled from the highly placed chest and abdomen. Although Harding had not yet passed the shadow-line between stout and fat, there was already an ominous sameness and lack of demarcation between stomach and chest, mitigated somewhat by the skillful hang of the trousers. “Have some breakfast, boys.”

“Can’t.” The Duchess was firm. “Tillie’s cleaned up.”

Jess helped W.G. into his frock coat. Daugherty watched attentively—
his
creation. But Jess wondered, at times, if it might not be the other way round. Daugherty talked strategy morning, noon and night while W.G. just gazed off into the distance, smiling at whatever it was he saw there. He seldom committed himself to anything; seldom gave a political opinion, as opposed to learned soliloquies on what he found in his favorite reading, newspaper sports pages. Yet whenever Daugherty would discuss the election of 1920, their common grail, it was W.G. who appeared to direct the discussion, as he did now, seated in an old rocker, going through a sheaf of carbon copies of telegrams and letters while the Duchess headed toward the back part of the house to tyrannize the servant.

“Now then, here’s the Colonel’s first telegram. Last month. He’s happy, as you might figure. Patriotism. Preparedness. And so on.” Harding adjusted his spectacles. “I committed myself to one Roosevelt division, that he himself would raise. Volunteers. Volunteers.” Harding sighed. “I don’t know what I can tell him. Now …” Harding’s voice trailed off.

Daugherty was on his feet, slowly coming to an energetic boil, like a Ford Model T engine, thought Jess, who envied his brilliant friend not only his formidable brain but his energy, which he could crank up himself. “You’ve done all you could, W.G. You tacked your amendment—the
Harding
amendment—onto the preparedness bill, and it passed, and it’s not your fault that Baker and Wilson refused to honor it, and ignored the will of Congress, due to partisan fever …”

“Don’t,” said Harding mildly, “make a speech. It’s bad for the digestion this early in the morning.
My
dyspepsia’s already starting to churn.”

“So what are you going to tell the Colonel today?” Daugherty sank into an armchair.

“Three not one.” Harding’s smile was seraphic.

“Three what?”

“I’m going to see to it that when the next draft bill comes up, a provision will be made not for one but for
three
divisions of volunteers to be raised by the Colonel just like he did during the war with Spain, when he encouraged the brave to volunteer, to rally to the flag!” W.G. belched softly; punished for breaking his own rule against matutinal speechifying.

“They’ll strike you down.” Daugherty was flat. “Wilson won’t give the Colonel a latrine to dig.”

Harding put away his papers. “That will be between the President and the Colonel. I shall have done
my
duty by the Colonel, which is all that matters, isn’t it, Harry?” Harding’s gaze was benign.

Daugherty nodded. “Well, it’s clever as hell, W.G., and that’s the truth. You’re just about the only link there is between that madman and the Regular Republicans, if he really wants to make up with us …”

“And he does just as much as we want to make up with him, to welcome him home, even if he did split our party in two and got the Democrats elected, which he now regrets most of all.” Harding relit the dead cigar he held in his hand. “I think,” he said at last, dreamily, exhaling blue-white smoke, “that I’m going to suggest to him that he be our standard-bearer next time around.”

“Why?” Daugherty was suddenly alert, the brown eye blinking hard.

“Well, Hughes came a cropper, and Taft’s forever out, so who else is there?” Harding smiled, generally, at Jess, as if he was a delegation of suffragettes.

“You know who else.” Daugherty looked away.

But Harding never, at least in Jess’s presence, responded to Daugherty’s prodding. “If he gets his divisions and goes off to war, he’ll come back a hero for a second time …”

“So he better not get his division.”

“I reckon that’s just what Mr. Wilson is saying to himself this morning. Anyway, like always, I want my friends to be happy.”

“Colonel Roosevelt’s your friend?” Daugherty chuckled.

“Oh, yes. Or he will be, after this morning.”

To Jess’s delight, he was allowed to accompany
his
great friends to the house of Mrs. Nicholas Longworth in M Street. The morning was damp, the sun pale, the press overexcited. A dozen journalists and photographers stood outside the narrow red-brick house. When they saw Senator Harding, they surrounded him, shouting questions. Jess was thrilled to think that he had just seen this much-sought-after man at home in his galluses while the press, eyes and voice to the people, must content themselves with a mere formal glimpse, a brief bloviation, Harding’s favorite noun to describe speechifying, and a mystery.

“Now, boys. Relax. I’m just the proprietor of the Marion
Star
, a small-town publisher, not like you big Hearst fellows and your—Oh-oh! There’s the
World
. I better keep my trap shut.” W.G. chatted for some minutes, giving pleasure but no news. Then he entered the house, followed by Daugherty and Jess.

The downstairs hall was crowded with journalists of the progressive sort, as well as friends of the great man. Although Jess hated the progressives to a man, Harding knew exactly how to jolly them along. But Alice Longworth
was not about to allow him any role in her house other than that of courtier, if not suppliant, to the warrior-king. “Senator!” She took his arm, and led him into the dining room. Jess looked at Daugherty—What to do? As if summoned, Daugherty marched right into the dining room and Jess did the same, very much aware that he was on history’s stage, for at the head of the table sat Theodore Roosevelt with Senator Lodge on his right and a half-dozen other political grandees. Jess made himself invisible next to a break-front filled with unused wedding presents, his emporium owner’s eye noted.

The appearance of Harding was electrical. Roosevelt leapt to his feet. Lodge languidly rose. Whatever they might have thought of Harding, and Jess was quite aware of the social disdain such people had for simple folk like W.G. and his Duchess, the presence of Ohio in that room, with all the state’s wealth not to mention electoral votes, made even the fat small shrill Colonel reverent. “Mr. Harding!” Each pumped the other’s hand. “You don’t know what this means. I’ll never forget your loyalty, Senator. Never. I don’t mean to me.” Roosevelt turned to the others, catching Lodge in a small yawn. But then Jess noticed that the Colonel had not seen the yawn because the eye that he had turned upon Lodge was plainly blind, damaged, it was said, in the White House by a medicine ball. “I mean to the whole country. Alone in the Senate, Mr. Harding saw the need for volunteers as well as conscripts.”

“Alone?” murmured Lodge.

But Roosevelt was now moving about the dining room, voice raised high. In the hallway, Alice was conferring with her sad-eyed husband, Nick, a bald man with a full moustache, who came from one of Cincinnati’s greatest families, and knew the McLeans better than anyone. But then old John McLean had begun his career in Ohio when he inherited the Cincinnati
Examiner;
later, he bought the Washington
Post
Jess took considerable pride in his state: three recent presidents, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley; and then the Longworths, the McLeans—Harding?

Harding had finally been allowed to speak. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said with a shy bob of his head—and he was shy, at least in the presence of those who could never forget his, or their, origins. “So I thought I’d pay my respects, Colonel, and tell you that no matter what kind of a draft bill we come up with next, there’ll be a Harding amendment added—for three, maybe four, divisions of volunteers, and the sooner we let
you
raise them, Colonel, the sooner we’ve got this war won.”

As Roosevelt seized Harding’s hand in both of his, Jess noticed how gray the famous face was; gray, too, moustache and hair; while behind the dusty
pince-nez, there were tears. At fifty-eight Theodore Roosevelt was a very old man. But then he had nearly died the previous year from a fever that he had caught big-game hunting in some South American jungle. “I swear to you, Senator, I will be true to your trust, and let me tell you what I plan to tell the President today.” The high voice suddenly lowered to a whisper. “
I
will go to France with my troops, at their head, and I will not return. Because I know that three months in the field will see me to the end …”

“I think, Theodore,” said Lodge, “that if you could convince Mr. Wilson that you were never coming back, you’d get your division this afternoon.”

“Root’s already made that sour joke,” said the Colonel, far too great a man to have a sense of humor.

Alice appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Tumulty’s just rung from the White House. The Logothete will see you at noon.”

“
President
Logothete,” Nick corrected Alice. Jess wondered what a logothete was: something pretty awful, probably. The Colonel liked big fierce words.

“Good! Good!” The Colonel clapped his hands. Alice poured coffee from a great pot on the sideboard. “I shall come as a beggar. On my knees. Wailing …”

“Mr. Wilson will like that.” Lodge was judicious; then W.G. nodded to Harry: time to go. But as the Ohioans stood up ready for departure, there was a disturbance from the reporters in the hall, as three more guests arrived. Jess recognized the Democrat James Burden Day, who had come to the Senate in 1915, the same year as Harding. With Day was a tall, willowy young couple, the man busy fending off reporters and the woman trying unsuccessfully either to put her large hat on or take it off.