Personal History (57 page)

When Phil came back from Glen Welby on that Friday, November 9, he skipped some scheduled RAND conferences but did attend a meeting at the
Post
. That night we went to the White House for dinner. The next day, Phil and I took my mother in the Gulfstream to Hyde Park for Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral. After their rocky adversarial early relations, my mother and Eleanor Roosevelt had grown very close—a really intimate friendship, involving many mutual interests, both personal and political. They were both in somewhat the same mold—very strong, cerebral, emotionally complicated, and fundamentally lonely. My mother was deeply saddened by Mrs. Roosevelt’s death. She had only two tickets to the funeral, so Phil escorted her to the service while Steve—whom we took along with us so that he wouldn’t be left alone in Washington—and I waited for them in the Poughkeepsie airport.

P
HIL’S BEHAVIOR GREW
more and more erratic. Things were getting very bad and much more public, but we all excused his angry, aberrant moods as signs of exhaustion. He
was
doing a great deal—and a great deal of what he was doing was still very good. At the same time, however, he began to turn on everyone around him with incredible explosions of anger. Blowups directed at Russ and Al were particularly extreme and became more regular, but both men covered up, so that others at the
Post
weren’t aware of either their frequency or their severity. Max Isenbergh, an old classmate and colleague whom Phil had recruited to work with him on COMSAT, recalled one day when Phil gratuitously turned on him. Nothing had stimulated him; he just wanted to be abusive, Max said—which seems typical of the explosions that were becoming habitual. Max also later told me that, around the time of the embargo of the news on Cuba, they were in Phil’s office when Phil got a phone call from the president. Max started to leave, but Phil told him to stay, and he heard Phil “talk to the president as I have never heard two French truck drivers in an accident talk to each other. And the president did not hang up.”

Phil was becoming more intolerant and offensive, using foul language to excess. During the summer of 1962, he had started to direct his angry outbursts at me. But there was worse to come. In mid-November, he met with the incorporators of COMSAT on what turned out to be a traumatic occasion. At one point, probably toward the end of the afternoon session, according to Max Isenbergh, Phil turned to him and said, “Moose”—
Max’s nickname—“take over, I’m going to the Metropolitan Club to get a massage,” and he walked out. That session was adjourned fairly soon afterwards, and everyone went off to dinner at the F Street Club, where Phil rejoined them. It was here that one of the board members, Byrne Litschgi, responding to a press release that had been prepared that afternoon and which concentrated on relatively minor appointments of personnel and consultants, suggested that it was “very important that the public know that you’re having stellar personnel and that’s a policy of COMSAT, but I think we ought to have a policy statement of some kind very soon.”

At that point, Phil became abusive and lunged across the table as if to strike Litschgi. People were aghast, and Phil was escorted out of the room. Everybody was baffled; no one knew what to do. Several of the incorporators stayed there talking until about 2:00 a.m.

Phil came home and recounted the story to me, telling me how this man had pushed him beyond endurance and that he felt he had to go away for a rest and to regain his calm. The very next day, we made hasty plans to leave for Palm Springs, though when we got there he decided he didn’t like it in California, so we packed up and left for the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. We took with us on this trip Liz Hylton, who had been recruited from the accounting department by Phil’s secretary, Charlie Paradise. She had been unhappy in accounting, and Phil had brought her in as number three in his office. Liz remains with me to this day, my invaluable assistant.

After only a few days away, Phil wrote to Litschgi, managing to work in some of his resentment against the man and only half backing off:

A couple of weeks later, Phil wrote Litschgi again, this time opening with an honest self-analysis of this incident:

It’s impossible to know whether time or a third person brought about this change in view.

Apart from dealing with some correspondence and business, mostly COMSAT-related, Phil and I had a comparatively quiet time in Phoenix, playing golf and resting. In the middle of the first week, Phil asked me to go with our plane to the Lockheed field in Burbank, California, to tell the people there how to redesign the interior, which was due for refitting in early December. Our “showroom” model plane had partitions with cutouts of dancing girls and “Come to Hawaii” motifs, all of which were to be taken out and replaced, and I was to choose the fabric and design. Phil also suggested that while I was in California I should call my sister Flo and meet her for lunch. Initially I protested, thinking it would be too difficult to arrange and saying that in any case we were supposed to go to
Los Angeles the following week to meet about the news service, so why bother now. “Call her,” Phil insisted, “and if necessary meet halfway.”

So I did. Flo and I met at the Brown Derby and had a long, touching, memorable lunch. We talked intimately about our parents, with her railing at great length about how much she disliked Mother, who, she complained, had succeeded in breaking up Flo’s most important early romances—one with David Grene, whom I had known at Chicago, and one with Drew Pearson, who had been judged not suitable by my mother. Flo viewed that particularly bitterly, given that Mother later became a great friend of Drew’s.

Flo was so obviously sad and tormented by all these events in the distant past that I finally said, “Wouldn’t you be happier if you put all this behind you? After all, you are fifty and she’s seventy-five. Isn’t it time?” My question had little effect; she remained adamantly negative about Mother. Ours, however, happily for me, was a close and loving exchange. Except for the unhappiness about the past, she seemed well. When I left her, we were both looking forward to our return to Los Angeles in a week or so and seeing more of each other.

Four days after our lunch, a messenger came and got me in the middle of a golf game to say that Flo had died suddenly. As far as anyone knows, there was no warning. Grief-stricken as I was, I felt and remain grateful to Phil for insisting that I call her for that lunch.

We immediately flew to Los Angeles. Again, Phil rose to the occasion and was the greatest help in every way to Flo’s boys—Vincent and Larry—and to me. I was deeply fond of Flo. She was so beautiful and funny and literate—and sad. She adored her boys and had brought them up carefully and closely. I will never be able to appraise the strange relationship she had with the Halperns, who seemed to have such a strong hold over her. After Flo’s death, they produced a letter signed by her saying that if anything happened to her they, the Halperns, were to have the boys. Soon after the funeral, the Halperns left for Europe without telling any of us, taking the boys with them. Flo had had a bitter divorce, and the eventual settlement excluded her husband from her boys’ lives. He remarried and, I think, took no interest in them. After that it became next to impossible to see or know the Homolka boys until the younger one, Larry, returned home and married his high-school girlfriend against the Halperns’ will. Vincent lives in England and relates to Mrs. Halpern. I’ve seen him only once. He gave most of his money away and lives a spartan existence.

After Flo’s funeral we went back to Phoenix, and the night before we headed home had drinks with Harry and Clare Luce in their house, which adjoined the Biltmore grounds. Despite the few weeks of rest interspersed with a certain amount of activity, Phil’s mood was agitated. At dinner that night, he removed Clare’s plastic shoes, declaring them to be unworthy of
her. Then, as we were leaving, he picked her up and carried her to the car, clearly a reflection of his fundamentally aberrant behavior.

O
NLY
the superficial effects of all Phil’s activity—the news-service expansion, the purchase of
ARTnews
, the acquisition of Walter Lippmann’s and, later, Joe Alsop’s columns, COMSAT, editorial and business decisions at
Newsweek
and the
Post
, buying the airplane and the second farm—were evident to the outside world. The last week of November 1962,
Time
ran an article about Phil titled “The Acquisitor,” in which the reporter asked if there were any more columnists to come, to which Phil responded, “Well, I could have had another big one, but I didn’t want to seem greedy.” The article also quoted Phil as saying, “I’m looking for another TV station or two, and maybe a pulp mill.”

December brought with it a quick return to the old heightened level of activity. Phil, still trying to get a team of people to take over the leadership of COMSAT, flew back and forth to New York several times in the next week and had another important meeting with the incorporators in New York on December 10. This time, he received a telegram from Sam Harris, effectively Phil’s vice-chairman, saying, “I knew that you could do it. Congratulations. Let us continue to reason together.” Phil himself thought this third meeting went quite well. As he wrote to George Killion, a COMSAT incorporator who had not been able to attend, “At least I did not repeat my offer to hit anyone.”

At the same time, Phil took part in some important RAND meetings, which he hosted at the
Post
. I’ve never been clear what he was engineering for RAND, but he received a telegram from its vice-president saying he had heard that Phil’s “superb performance saved the day. The country, the Air Force and the people who are RAND all won. I can assure you at least the latter group will not soon forget. We’ll strive to merit your success.” Here was yet another demonstration that, even in the midst of this darkening scene of hyperactivity, rage, and irrationality, Phil still retained much of his ability and got significant things accomplished.

On December 13, he went to the White House to meet with President Kennedy to report on space-communications issues and a few other matters, and the next day he flew to Europe on COMSAT business. It was on this second trip within five weeks that Phil reconnected with Robin Webb. On the official schedule, she was described by Phil as “Newsweek reporter and temporary personal shopper, tour director and femme de chambre for our group.” I had no idea what was going on in Paris, except that I thought Phil was engaged in a very important task. Soon after he came home, we settled in at our R Street house for the Christmas holidays. Phil had grown increasingly to dislike Christmas, and gradually I
had taken over everything having to do with it—decorating, planning, gift-buying, parties—especially since his years of mood swings. That Christmas Eve afternoon, the world I had known and loved ended for me. The phone rang and I picked it up, not realizing that Phil, too, had picked it up, in his dressing room, with the door shut. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. I waited until he had hung up and went right in and asked him if what I had surmised was true. He said it was.

It’s hard to describe my total devastation after my discovery of the affair. This kind of thing has happened to innumerable people of both sexes, but I had never dreamed it could happen to me. I knew that marriages could endure momentary disloyalties, but this was different. It’s very hard to understand, even in retrospect, how the possibility of his having an affair had never occurred to me, I was so blinded by the closeness of our relationship and by what we had been through together in the last years. My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my own total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. Also, it was part of my bafflement at what I saw as Phil’s increasingly strange behavior. I had no understanding of the context of the terrible depression he had come through or the polar-opposite mood that was dominating him at the time: not even then had anyone bothered to utter the term “manic-depressive.” I truly believed that he and I were bound together by time, by choice, by shared experiences, by our family, and by the life of the company that was so important to both of us.