Personal History (17 page)

My father wrote:

He described a lunch at the French Embassy with Arthur Krock of
The New York Times;
Fred Essary of the
Baltimore Sun;
Felix Morley, then the
Post
’s editorial-page editor; Sir Wilmott Lewis of the London
Times;
and “myself from the Wash Post.” He added charmingly, “Such things
make me feel like a regular newspaper guy.… Circulation 108,500 and going up—110,000 by sooner than you think.” Then he added movingly, especially in view of how small the
Post
was at the time and how difficult the struggle:

What did he mean and what did I think? Looking back, I can only assume that I wanted to be a journalist and that he had a newspaper. I’m sure that he wasn’t writing to my sisters or even my brother in this way. I am equally sure that neither one of us saw me as a manager. It interests me how he—and I—assumed at the time that I would be a journalist.

One contribution I did make to the
Post
was in the all-important area of the comics. I told my father about the comic strip “Terry and the Pirates,” which was the talk of Chicago, and was then relatively new. He found it available and picked it up with great success. I felt pleased to have helped.

Right after Roosevelt’s overwhelming victory in 1936, someone wrote the
Post
a letter suggesting welcoming the victorious president back to town. Next day the paper published a front-page box headed “Let’s give the President a real welcome.” The response was remarkable: two hundred thousand gathered at Union Station at eight o’clock in the morning to hail “The Champ,” who rewarded Dad with a special wave to his second-floor window on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I wrote a rather sour letter to my father about this event, saying that I thought it was corny and trying to have it both ways, and that, for me, this was one of the
Post
’s lower moments—to which he responded instantly and aggressively. He thought it was a great idea and reported that other papers had participated, too. He further defended himself by saying the Associated Press had carried the story and even
Time
had mentioned it. He added:

This was as overt a difference as we ever had. Even when he was criticizing my judgment, he was always kind and supportive. It says a lot for my father’s equanimity that he was unbothered by this kind of exchange; in fact, he relished differences of opinion and sharp exchanges as signs that people had minds of their own. For example, he had started small trust funds for all of us at birth. He did this because he felt his own father had used money to control his children, and he didn’t want to do the same thing; he wanted us to be independent of his will.

What I didn’t grasp at the time was my father’s real bias in my favor, the depth of his caring. My mother’s hints that he had a crush on me and the stories she relayed of his hoarding my letters didn’t sink in. In retrospect, I can see this intense affection we had for each other and what an enormous influence he had on my life, my plans, and my thinking. I’m not sure why I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but it’s clear to me now that he believed in me, which became a very powerful emotional asset as I grew older and gave me a measure of security which I greatly needed.

Relations with my mother were different. She was becoming more and more difficult and self-centered. It was hopeless to ask her a personal question or for advice: she had constructed an image of what we were all like and what our lives were like, and she never really looked to see if the reality fit her image.

After the 1936 election, Mother returned to Washington a little sadder—not too much so—and a good deal wiser. My father, not really one to say “I told you so,” did take some consolation from having advised her to stay out of the job she had gotten herself into with Landon. My one meeting with her candidate was a perfect example of the contrast between the two worlds in which I was moving—that of my Republican parents, and my more liberal university environment. Just a few weeks after the election, I was taking the overnight train home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Sidney Hyman and some other friends came down to the station to see me off and, as a goodbye bouquet, presented me with a real hammer and sickle tied up with a red bow. There was nothing to do with this awkward joke but take it with me. I arrived home next morning still carrying the unwieldy implements and walked into the Washington house, where the door was opened by the butler and I found my parents in the library conferring with the defeated candidate—Alf Landon himself. I hastily disposed of the hammer and sickle before joining them.

It was during the 1930s that my mother started seriously on her career of speechmaking on a variety of issues, particularly welfare and education. Her letters to me were fuller than ever of accounts of speeches, of audience sizes, and of the enthusiastic reaction she always received and the many demands for copies. She had enormous and wide-ranging intellectual
interests and wrote on many subjects; in fact, at this point her life centered on her writing. For a couple of years, she often went alone to the “Cabin”—as we called the lovely smallish modern house my parents had built overlooking the Potomac River in Virginia, about half an hour from town—to work on her book on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Mann.

It was during this time that she began another of her passionate friendships with men—one that consumed her and threatened her equanimity even as it sustained and enriched her. This one was with Thomas Mann, and even before she met the man himself she had fallen for him through his writings. Having earlier discovered his novels for myself, I had become an enthusiast, but my mother went further. In April of 1937, she finally saw Mann in person when she went to New York to hear him lecture on Wagner at the New School and was completely bowled over by the experience, calling him an “absorbing if unrequited passion,” admiring him as both a writer and a human being. A second lecture, on Freud, only increased her first impression that here was one of the few authentically great men of the day. She was delighted to find that “such a great soul exists in our poor age,” and immediately decided to interview him for the
Post
. She who was cynical about conspicuous members of society (or so she claimed), she who described herself as someone “who would rather meet an honest shoemaker than the average artist,” was so overcome with emotion when she arrived for the interview (to be held in German, of course) that she “scarcely felt equal to the task.” When she actually met him, her excitement was unbounded and contagious. In a letter to me she described the experience in great detail—and revealingly:

When my mother returned to Washington from the meeting, she was still so uplifted by Mann’s words, the power of his personality, and her belief in his importance to liberal thought throughout the world that she wrote him her version of a fan letter. The next day, exhausted, as she said, “by the storm of my emotions,” she set to work on the interview, which duly appeared in the
Post
. This experience with Mann—or, more important, the strength of her feelings for him—compelled her to advise me: “Be a newspaperwoman, Kay, if only for the excuse it gives you to seek out at once the object of any sudden passion.”

Mother’s physical problems were always dramatized, as were her emotional ones. As her attachment to Mann grew, so too did her emotional instability. The first overt evidence of a serious problem occurred the summer of 1937 at our ranch in Wyoming. My parents had picked me up that summer after I finished my courses in Chicago and took Ruthie and me to the ranch to spend some time there relaxing. It was a traumatic stay. Mother was going through a king-sized change of life, and, I suppose, depression exacerbated her already highly excitable state. She had started to drink noticeably by then.

One day, when we were all out for a ride in the beautiful valley, her horse ran away with her. Ruthie—an excellent rider, far better than I—was nearest to her and took out after her, as did the cowboys. Her horse was caught and somehow stopped, but something had snapped. It was an emotional explosion. She went completely to pieces, fought with my father, and generally retreated from him into her own cabin, where she started to drink seriously. We were all deeply disturbed.

My father could do nothing with her, and it fell to me to try to help her, to find out what was the matter and try to calm her down. The day after the runaway-horse scare, she climbed up a nearby mountain. I went after her, really worried about what she might do—she was so distraught—and finally caught up with her near the top, where we sat down and talked. Some of the time I talked while she wept. She had got so fervently involved with Mann and his writing that he seemed bound up in all her thoughts and feelings. When she talked, she concentrated on how wonderful he was, how much he meant to her, how brave and perceptive he was, how she understood him and could help him, what a terrible world it was in which he was an exile from his country and in which even people here in the United States didn’t understand or appreciate him. Luckily, I
could sympathize, so I was able to discuss—there, in the most incredible of settings—his writings and greatness with her, and eventually to calm her down enough to get her off the mountain. But for the rest of our stay on the ranch she remained more or less secluded, in bed or drinking but not communicating, especially not with my father.

From then on, I increasingly began to act as an adult, to help with Ruthie—still in high school at Madeira—and quite often with my mother. On a personal level, you had to sustain her, and very little came back in exchange. This was especially hard on Ruthie, who, being at home, was required to fit in with whatever Mother needed or wanted to do. Without realizing it, Mother was using Ruthie for company.

I found I actually enjoyed the responsibility and being of help. And during this time my father and I grew even closer. The fact that I shared his interest in journalism and public issues no doubt increased our closeness, but so did my helping with my mother’s distress.

B
Y THE END
of my first year at Chicago, I had decided I wouldn’t return to Vassar but would stay on. I had found an intellectually stimulating academic environment, had developed wonderful friendships, had grown up significantly and enjoyed myself very much indeed. But I went on experiencing the usual angst about “who I was” and how to survive the great strength and influence of the family. I had occasional romantic flirtations—sometimes on my part, sometimes on a young man’s, but rarely both at once. One of these attachments was a strange emotional relationship with a political scientist, Hal Winkler, who was much shorter than I but very intense and passionate. I was always attracted physically to brilliance, and he was brilliant—or so it seemed to me—but I was still shy and virginal and didn’t know how to cope with sexual advances. I apparently went on looking a great deal more directed and together than I felt.

One of the most significant things to occur in the fall of my senior year was a visit from my sister Bis, who was then working in California. I was always excited at the prospect of seeing Bis, who had been in Europe, New York, and Hollywood while I was in Washington, Vassar, and Chicago. Her friends remained glamorous and even famous. In Europe, she had somehow grown friendly with Queen Marie of Romania and her daughter, Princess Illeana. In New York, she had been friendly with and even courted by the playwright Sam Behrman, and she saw a good deal of George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, and Harpo Marx, visited the famous Herbert Swope and his wife, and knew Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and others of the Algonquin set. She had a serious romance with a movie producer whom she wanted to marry—an idea nixed by my mother, who thought it unsuitable. Mother once told me proudly how she had
stopped Bis from going to Hollywood and marrying this young man. She said she went up to our family’s New York apartment, where Bis was living, and argued with her for a week. Bis remained adamant until my mother said, “Bis, if you do this, it will kill your father.” And that, said my mother with satisfaction, stopped her.