Personal History (10 page)

My father was also involved in Republican politics, though in a less active way. He, in fact, worked for both parties on nonpartisan things, from the War Industries Board to the Farm Loan Board to the Federal Reserve Board. By the mid-1920s, he had helped revive American agriculture through his work on the War Finance Corporation, which had special authorization to make loans for the benefit of farmers and livestock growers. He liquidated the corporation early in 1925 in an achievement that was widely recognized as remarkable. As Merlo Pusey described it in his biography of my father:

During my childhood, when my father was busy with his series of government jobs, my parents were mostly absent. When they were home, there were formal moments when we would see them. My mother always had her breakfast in bed, and my father usually had his in her bedroom, on a small table beside her. We went upstairs to see them for a little while before we went our separate ways. Mother sometimes took one of us for a drive in the park in the afternoon or had us in for a talk in her bedroom, but these occasions were few and far between, and more often than not the exchanges were one-way. Nonetheless, I loved these times and once commented that since she was so busy, perhaps we should make appointments to meet—a story she used to repeat as quaint.

My parents went out to dinner most evenings, or entertained elaborately at home. Sometimes I visited with Mother as she dressed, or when she was being massaged or manicured. My mother impressed me as being incredibly glamorous, regal, and beautiful, and I was secretly proud when she appeared at school functions elegantly dressed. But though I was deeply fond of her when I was very young, I was awed by and terrified of her at the same time. With the rarest exceptions, I was much too scared ever to consider disobeying. On the few occasions I did, the results made a lasting impression. On my first trip to Europe, when I was eleven, Mother told Bill and me to go to the ship’s barber to get our hair cut. We had another plan. Bill told me to tell her there was a line waiting and that we would go later, and I mindlessly carried out his order, something I tended to do too much throughout my life. Mother somehow found out there wasn’t any line at the barber’s and severely reprimanded me for lying, which I wasn’t even aware I was doing, and put me alone in my cabin. I was crushed, but the episode made an indelible impression on me about the importance of telling the truth.

A few years later, as a freshman in high school, I transgressed again on the coiffeur front—I cut my long curly black hair against my mother’s will. I awaited her reaction with fear and trepidation and was puzzled and a bit humiliated when she failed to notice the change until at last I called her attention to it. She then shrugged it off, leaving me confused. It had taken such courage to do.

Children watch and listen to their parents, sometimes critically but sometimes unquestioningly. Each of my parents influenced us in large ways and small. Certain of their habits rubbed off and left their mark. One very peculiar habit I picked up unconsciously from my mother was a tendency to be suspicious and tight and ungenerous about small things. Though she was very lavish in some ways, she would complain about small bills she received, certain that people were cheating her. She would buy a fur and say, “You have to be careful, because you can choose one and they’ll substitute another.” She said, “If you have your pearl necklace restrung
you have to sit and watch to be sure you get your own pearls back.” She was mean about raises for people in the house. She literally hated to give things away, even praise or encouragement. I, too, developed an inability to spend money, along with a dark suspicion that people were taking advantage of me and an inability to enjoy giving.

Many of these habits were overcome when I married Phil Graham, who was exceedingly generous and imaginatively giving. Some habits I have never overcome are odd ones I inherited from my father. Despite the vast scale on which we lived, my father had peculiar fixations on certain small expenses. He preached tiny economies with zeal—using things up completely, never wasting, never phoning if you could wire, or better still, write. The compulsion I am still left with is turning out every light before I go to bed at night. To this day, alone in a house I am totally unable to leave a light on—I will go up and down halls and staircases if I know a light is on. I tell myself to stop, that it doesn’t matter, yet then I go and turn it off.

Some lessons were impressed on me by reverse example. When I was young I perceived grown-ups behaving quite oddly at times. I remember being shocked or dismayed by things I observed and making silent vows not to behave as they did when I grew up. For instance, my mother, when confronted with a line waiting at the movies, would go up to the box office and say, “I am Mrs. Eugene Meyer of
The Washington Post,”
and demand to be taken in and seated. At that time, she did indeed get in. I cringed with embarrassment and hoped the ground would swallow me up. It had such a lasting effect on me that I have never been able to deal with headwaiters in restaurants who put you “in Siberia” rather than the better part of the restaurant. I just go meekly to Siberia.

As the years went on, my mother seemed to have a more and more difficult time emotionally. She became increasingly engrossed in her friendships with the series of men in her life, only one of which, I believe, may have been a true affair—the one with Bill Ward. She was constantly beset with colds, pneumonia, or various other illnesses, and she reacted to each one with the greatest amount of care, self-pity, and drama, demanding and receiving constant visits, with all of us dancing attendance. In retrospect, I wonder if depression contributed to this intense concentration on her health.

She also started to drink more heavily, sometimes starting as early as ten in the morning, at least during one period in her life. This was a problem that greatly worried my father and was an escalating burden to him and to all of us. Even her drinking was done in a somewhat eccentric way. There was an old-fashioned locked whiskey-and-wine closet in the basement to which only my father had the key, so he would have to make repeated trips to the cellar and therefore knew exactly how much she was
drinking. Of course, admonishments on this score never had an effect. The surprising thing is that she never bought whiskey herself or asked him for her own key.

My mother’s effect on us was often contradictory. We received every encouragement for what we accomplished, yet her ego was such that she trampled on our incipient interests or enthusiasms. If I said I loved
The Three Musketeers
, she responded by saying I couldn’t really appreciate it unless I had read it in French, as she had. Mother herself read constantly until the week she died—philosophy, history, biography, and all the English, American, French, German, and Russian classics. She had only scorn for people who read light novels, let alone trash or time-wasters.

The summer between fourth and fifth grades I spent almost entirely by myself reading in a room on the third floor of Mount Kisco, where I went through all of Dumas, eight volumes of Louisa May Alcott (starting with
Little Women), Treasure Island
, and a stirring adventure series by a man named Knipe. I counted up at the end, found that I had read around one hundred books, and wrote my parents that I was “positively floating in books.” I couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, this early passion for reading somehow diminished after the fifth grade, until I read only sporadically. A little later on I was concentrating on movie magazines,
Redbook
, and
Cosmopolitan
. Later still, I resumed reading, particularly loving Dickens’s
Great Expectations
and Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.

Mother set impossibly high standards for us, creating tremendous pressures and undermining our ability to accomplish whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves. Fundamentally, I think we all felt we somehow hadn’t lived up to what she expected or wanted of us, and the insecurities and lack of self-confidence she bred were long-lasting. But despite whatever personal doubts about us she may have had, the picture of her family she presented to the world was unblemished. She created and then perpetuated the myth of her children’s perfection. From her point of view, we were all happy, bilingual overachievers. Indeed, on some levels she was proud of us. She used to compare us to the characters in a then-popular novel called
The Constant Nymph
, about an eccentric, boisterous, and madly funny family known as the Sanger Circus. Other myths she propagated about us were that Meyer girls were brighter, more attractive, funnier, smarter, more successful, this or that—in short, better than anyone else. Most important, she felt we
should
be different, more intellectual, eccentric even.

In addition, there were expectations of us for social success, also difficult to define and deal with. Popularity at school or parties was thought to be a necessity for Meyer girls. I always said I had a wonderful time at a party whether I did or not, and quite often I didn’t. If one of my parents came to school or college, I thought I had to assemble a group of
friends so that I could at least give the appearance of being in an acceptable swim.

When we were very young, the McLeans, who then owned
The Washington Post
, gave children’s parties at which expensive favors—even watches—were given to their guests. Mother told me in what poor taste this was, and that she wouldn’t let my sisters go. A friend of hers suggested that perhaps it was important to be seen there, to which my mother responded, “I want my children to be the ones to want to be with.”

Her predisposition to think this way also meant that she condescended to the average, to the pedestrian, to the everyday. This negative view of the commonplace became very much a part of me and my confusion. I knew that I wasn’t any of the things that were held out as desirable. I also knew that I wanted to fit into the world—to be liked by people around me. Yet I adopted a lot of the family’s philosophy, as did my older sisters and brother. I remember in college saying to my friend Mary Gentry as we crossed the Vassar campus, “Do you like the girls here?” “Yes,” she said, bringing me up short to the possibility that my criteria were suspect. I thought I should be condescending toward nice, normal people and only like the brilliant eccentrics. It took me a long time to stop thinking that I had to be different and that there was something wrong with being normal or average, and to get to the point of enjoying a variety of people for what they were.

I can’t say I think Mother genuinely loved us. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. I liked him, but always from a distance. Actually, he delighted in children and was rather jolly with us, but a little awkward. At most, he would take one of us as a small child onto his lap and dangle a watch at our ear. When Ruth and I were very young, he would come into our bedroom before breakfast for a short period of roughhouse play.

But though he lacked the gift of intimacy, in many ways his supportive love still came through to me. He somehow conveyed his belief in me without ever articulating it, and that was the single most sustaining thing in my life. That was what saved me. I realized this only in retrospect, however, since our relationship took time to grow.

S
ENSITIVE SUBJECTS
were rarely mentioned at our house, but three were particularly taboo—money, my father’s being Jewish, and sex. None of the three was ever articulated by any of us in the family; in fact,
nothing
difficult or personal was discussed among us. There was such an aversion to talking about money or our wealth that, ironically, there was, in some
odd ways, a fairly spartan quality to our lives. We were not showered with conspicuous possessions, elaborate toys, or clothes. At one point, when Florence was eleven, my mother wrote in her diary that she had gotten Flo very modest presents for her birthday—“books, pralines and other simple things.” Though Mother felt that she had been a bit mean, she also felt that “it is the best way to continue their chance for happiness to restrain the desire for possessions.”

I had less than most of the girls in my class—certainly fewer clothes. My spare wardrobe in grammar school consisted of one or two jumpers and blouses for school, and one best dress. We were also treated strictly in the matter of allowance. I still remember a telegram Bis sent my father from Vassar: “Allowance early or bust.” He wired back, “Bust.” The only discussions I do remember relating to wealth had to do with being told that you couldn’t just be a rich kid, that you had to do something, to be engaged in useful, productive work; you couldn’t and shouldn’t do
nothing
. Working was always a part of my life. I remember one Christmas vacation, when I was probably about fifteen, spent at the Federal Reserve Board learning to draw graphs.

My mother’s ambivalence about money and what it brought to her no doubt contributed to her own unwillingness to talk about it. Once, in 1922, after a visit to a Utah copper mine that had yielded my father great financial gains, she wrote in her diary: “[The mine] was an interesting sight but the village that led up to it appalled me.… This is where [the money] comes from and I spend it on Chinese art but it was a shock to think that we live on money that is produced under such conditions.”

Remarkably, the fact that we were half Jewish was never mentioned any more than money was discussed. I was totally—incredibly—unaware of anti-Semitism, let alone of my father’s being Jewish. I don’t think this was deliberate; I am sure my parents were not denying or hiding my father’s Jewishness from us, nor were they ashamed of it. But there was enough sensitivity so that it was never explained or taken pride in. Indeed, we had a pew in St. John’s Episcopal Church—the president’s church, on Lafayette Square—but mainly because the rector was a friend of the family. When I was about ten, all of us Meyer children were baptized at home to satisfy my devout Lutheran maternal grandmother, who thought that without such a precaution we were all headed for hell. But for the most part, religion was not part of our lives.