Master of the Senate (32 page)

His arrival on Capitol Hill was still as ostentatiously attention-getting as possible. His long affair with Alice Glass, the tall, spectacularly beautiful small-town girl from Marlin who had become the elegant hostess of a manor house in the Virginia hunt country, had faded out during the war. That affair, the most serious of Lyndon Johnson’s life, had been kept very secret, in part because Alice was the mistress—she would later be the wife—of a man very important to Johnson, Charles Marsh, publisher of the
Austin American-Statesman;
in part perhaps because of Johnson’s feelings for her, which men and women privy to the affair believed were so intense that they felt Johnson might divorce Lady Bird and marry her. During his last years in the House, after that relationship ended, Johnson began arriving on Capitol Hill in the morning in the company of another tall, beautiful woman—one who was famous as well. And now that he was in the Senate, he sometimes still got out of his car with her, and they walked to his office openly holding hands.

When Helen Gahagan Douglas was named one of “the twelve most beautiful women in America,” the critic Heywood Broun begged to disagree. “Helen Gahagan Douglas is ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America,” he wrote. At the age of twenty-two, the tall, blond Barnard College student with a long, athletic stride became an overnight sensation in the Broadway hit
Dreams for Sale
, and she was to star in a succession of hit shows, marrying one of her leading men, Melvyn Douglas. Deciding to study voice, she made her debut in the title role of
To sea
in Prague, and toured Europe in operas and concerts for two years, before returning to more Broadway starring roles and radio appearances. On screen, she played the cruel, sensual Empress of Kor in the film version of H. Rider Haggard’s novel
She.
By 1936, the
New York Herald Tribune
noted that “Helen Gahagan Douglas has made her name in four branches of the arts—theatre, opera, motion pictures, and radio.”

Driving across country with Douglas after their marriage, Helen had been touched by the plight of Okies trekking west, and plunged into a new field—politics—with her usual success. She became Democratic national committee-woman from California, and in 1944, at the age of forty-three, ran for Congress from a Los Angeles district, and won, becoming one of nine women members of the House of Representatives. Washington, one journalist wrote, “had prepared for her tall, stately and gracious beauty, but they weren’t prepared for her brilliance, in short, her brains.” A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s (whose husband, Helen said, was “the greatest man in the world”), she was a frequent guest at the White House, while Melvyn remained back in Hollywood making movies. On the House floor she was a striking figure, generally “surrounded,” as one account noted, “by attentive male colleagues,” and she was a riveting, charismatic speaker in her advocacy of liberal causes, particularly civil rights. Declaring that “she stood by the Negro people when they needed a sentinel on the wall,” Mary McLeod Bethune called her “the voice of American democracy.” She won re-election in 1946, and again in 1948, and was one of the most sought-after speakers for liberal rallies across the country. And in an era in
which age supposedly dimmed a woman’s charms, hers seemed as bright as ever. A profile in the
New York Post
in 1949 commented that during her years in Congress “her waistline has grown even slimmer, her face leaner.” In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the previous year, the
Post
said, “she boosted her stock still higher by turning out to be gorgeous on television.” The
New York Daily News
called her the “Number One glamour girl of the Democratic Party.” It was widely expected that she would run for the Senate from California in 1950, and would win.

S
HE HAD FIRST MET
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
in 1945 when, shortly after she arrived in Congress, he dropped around to her office, “draped his long frame in one of my easy chairs,” and asked how things were going. When she said that she was having trouble organizing her office, he said, “Well, come up and see how my office is run.” She found his office “very impressive. It worked. If he wanted something, it came within a half second.” There were “other industrious offices,” she was to recall, “but the efficiency of this office and the extent that they went to reach … the lives of his constituents in an intimate way was something that utterly fascinated me.” She was impressed as well by qualities which she discerned, with a very penetrating eye, in his character: by his instinct for power (“He never got very far away from Rayburn”); by his ambition (he was “in a hurry—in a great, great hurry” and “He was willing to make the compromises necessary, I believe, to stay in Congress”); and by the method by which he concealed views that might stand in the way of the realization of that ambition—a method that, she felt, required great strength. Lyndon Johnson talked so much, she saw, but he never said anything that could be “quoted back against him later.” “Was it just caution?” she was to say. “Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …’” She began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was very “strong.” In Washington, she was to say, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” This tall, lanky, charming man was actually “one of the most close-mouthed men I ever knew.” When, years later, “John Kennedy was killed,” and she realized that Lyndon Johnson would be President, “I remember thinking that one thing was sure, we had heard the last frank response to a question from the press.” And, she felt, she knew where Johnson really stood: she was sure he was a New Dealer like her. “He cared about people; was never callous, never indifferent to suffering…. There was a warmth about the man.” That was why, she says, that “despite some of his votes, the liberals whom he always scoffed at … nevertheless forgave him when they wouldn’t forgive
someone else.” While his attempt to portray himself as an insider offended some of his House colleagues, it didn’t offend her. “He knew what was going to happen…. The friendship of Sam Rayburn … had much to do with it, but there was also Lyndon’s own presence, which exuded the unmistakable air of the keeper of the keys.” They shared the same feelings for Roosevelt, she was to say, and “on the day of his funeral” in April, 1945, “we were both very depressed.” Lyndon invited her to come to his fifth-floor hideaway, and “we sat very quietly during the time of the funeral, reminiscing about our President. In this way we became friends. Mutual admiration of Franklin Roosevelt.”

Soon Johnson was coming to the House floor more often than formerly, to sit beside her when she was there—although he didn’t stay long. On the floor, “he looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half-closed,” she recalls. “Then, suddenly, he’d jump up to his feet nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” And he would leave, “loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain.”

On one occasion on the floor, however, he came to her rescue—or to be more precise brought Rayburn to her rescue.

John Rankin of Mississippi was speaking when he suddenly pointed to a group of liberal representatives who were sitting together and referred to them as “these communists.” The other liberals sat silent, afraid to challenge the Mississippi demagogue—all except Helen Douglas. Standing to make a point of order, she said, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!”

“Rankin looked at me—oh, what a look—and went right on talking,” she was to recall. Most congressmen had learned not to confront him, and Helen Douglas had herself once been warned by Majority Leader John McCormack, “Remember, Rankin is a killer.” But she didn’t sit down. Instead, in her ringing, melodic voice, she said again, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!” and went on standing—a tall blond figure on the House floor.

Since the Speaker had to be in the chair for a point of order, Rayburn entered the Chamber and took the podium, saying, “The gentleman from Mississippi will have to answer the congresswoman,” but Rankin, acting as if he had not heard Rayburn, went on talking; as Ms. Douglas recalls, he “was such a fearsome man, he appeared to believe himself untouchable.” Rayburn, not quite sure what the fuss was about, was letting him do so, when Johnson hurriedly approached the podium, Ms. Douglas says. He “had been in the House coffee shop when someone ran in and told him, ‘Helen is taking on Rankin!’ I was told later that he had bounded up the stairs to the Chamber three at a time.” As always he knew the right words to persuade someone to do something. “Who runs this House, you or Rankin?” he whispered up to the Speaker. “Sam scowled and banged his gavel again,” Helen Douglas recalls. “This time his voice was fierce with warning as he again ordered Rankin to answer me.”
Rankin “measured Rayburn,” she was to recall. The Speaker did not say another word, but simply stared at Rankin, his face set in the stern mask that men feared. “With obvious pain,” as Helen Douglas recalls, Rankin said, “I am not addressing the gentlewoman from California.”

M
ORE AND MORE FREQUENTLY
, Lyndon and Helen began arriving on Capitol Hill in the mornings in the same car—sometimes hers, more often his. They would park on New Jersey Avenue, about a block and a half from the House Office Building, and walk to it together, holding hands: a conspicuous couple, both tall, both with dramatic features, walking with long strides as they came up Capitol Hill. Often, at the end of the day, they would drive, together or in separate cars, to Helen’s home on Thirty-first Street, where they would have dinner together. They went to parties together. (During the first six months Helen was in Washington, Melvyn was in India, and when he returned, his relationship with Helen proved difficult; “over the next several years,” her biographer Ingrid Winther Scobie was to write, “[their] relationship continued to deteriorate.” He returned to California. In May, 1946, their two children went to California for the Summer, and in September were enrolled in a boarding school near Los Angeles.)

Whatever the considerations that had deterred Lyndon Johnson from advertising his relationship with Alice Glass, they evidently didn’t apply to Helen Douglas. He made sure that people believed he was having a physical relationship with her. Not only would they be holding hands when they arrived together in the morning, they sometimes strolled through the Capitol together, with tourists coming up to the former actress to tell her they had enjoyed one of her performances, and they held hands during those strolls. “They were a handsome couple,” one of Helen’s friends, United Nations bureaucrat Charles Hogan, was to recall. “A strikingly handsome couple together. She’s so much better looking than poor Lady Bird.”

In particular, it seems, he wanted Alice Glass to believe it. When he parked on New Jersey Avenue, he usually parked in front of Number 317, a small building in which Alice’s sister, Mary Louise, who was then working on the staff of a Pennsylvania congressman, had an apartment. “Helen Douglas’ affair with Lyndon started just after she got to Washington,” Mary Louise says. “I know because I used to see them going to work in the mornings holding hands.” And, Mary Louise says, she knew because Johnson wanted her to know. “They would park on the street in front of my house,” even if there were spaces available on New Jersey Avenue closer to the House Office Building, she says, and she felt he parked there so that she would see the hand-holding, and tell Alice about it. If she happened to be coming out of her building while they were parking, Johnson and Helen would walk to work with her; “we’d all go in together.” In fact, she says, Lyndon himself told her sister about his new
affair. Before the war, Alice and Charles Marsh had attended the annual Music Festival in Salzburg, Austria, and Helen Gahagan Douglas had sung several concerts there. “Well, I’ve got another girl who spent the summer at Salzburg,” Lyndon told Alice, in a remark that hurt her, and angered Mary Louise. “Just bragging—kissing and telling,” she says.

Some of Johnson’s staff believed the affair was still going on after Johnson was in the Senate. When Horace Busby arrived in 1948, he was told about it by other staff members, and then he saw the hand-holding for himself. “It started not long after she came to the House in 1944, and continued on and off for years,” Busby was to say. Johnson and Douglas would come back to Suite 231 in the Senate Office Building together, enter Johnson’s private office through the door from the corridor, and stay inside “for quite a long time.” Others believed it, too. “Lyndon would park his car in front of the [Douglas] house night after night after night,” says Creekmore Fath, an attorney from Austin who was a Department of Interior official living in Washington at the time. “It was an open scandal in Washington.” More than one friend of the two principals urged Helen to break it off, telling her, “You’ve got to stop Lyndon from doing this.”

This intense phase of the relationship would end in August, 1949, when Helen Douglas returned to California to run for the Senate the following year, in the infamous campaign in which she was defeated by Richard Nixon after his staff published a pamphlet, printed on pink paper, to “prove” she was “soft on Communism,” and launched a whispering campaign harping on the fact that her husband was Jewish. (Lyndon Johnson helped her with advice—it was at his suggestion that she campaigned by helicopter as he had done in Texas in 1948—and with campaign contributions from his Texas financial backers.) She never ran for public office again. According to her biographer, Scobie, she decided her family had “suffered enough” from the demands of her career and tried to repair the damage, but with only limited success. Her attempts to resurrect her stage and singing career met with the same result. She did not again live in Washington. Yet while Johnson was Vice President, he telephoned Busby one weekend—a weekend when Lady Bird was in New York—and told him to come to his house. When he arrived, he found Johnson and Helen Douglas lounging by the swimming pool in the back yard. They held hands throughout the conversation and Busby was struck by the “real and deep feelings” between them.