Personal History (9 page)

At the age of eight, I entered the fourth grade at Potomac School, only two blocks from our house. Potomac was a private conventional grammar school, and so I went from a free-form, permissive society to a completely structured school where the desks were in rows, the school day was programmed, there was homework, and—worst of all—they were starting fractions, which looked like a foreign language to me.

Entering Potomac as a new girl was difficult. I think of my life in my early years there as being solitary. I felt awkward, out of place, and different, especially in the ribbed socks that no one else wore. It was the last class in which there were both girls and boys; from fifth through eighth grades, beyond which Potomac didn’t go, there were only girls, as was the case at Madeira, where I went to high school, and for my first two years of college, at Vassar.

Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment—one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited. I had to observe what was done, to imitate. I had to cope with my loneliness, my differences, and become some other person. I was more or less alone until my second year there, or fifth grade, when I figured out how to start making friends by inviting people over to the house. Rose Hyde became my best friend, despite the way I extended my initial invitation to her: “Rose, I’ve called everyone else and nobody can come over. Can you?” She could, and it was the beginning of a long friendship.

By the seventh and eighth grades, I had made some other friends: Julia Grant and Madeline Lang—both daughters of army officers, and Julia the granddaughter of President Grant. When we studied the Civil War in sixth grade, the students brought in pictures of their relatives who had fought in the war. Rose brought one of her great-grandfather, who was a clergyman in the Confederate Army. Julia came with the famous photograph of General Grant leaning against a tree. “Guess why he’s leaning up against that tree,” Rose cracked. “Because he’s too drunk to stand up.” Julia socked her, knocking her down in the playground. Rose’s mother had to write a note of apology to Mrs. Grant, and peace was restored.

Julia and Madeline visited me at the farm in Mount Kisco when I was twelve or thirteen—my first houseguests, an exciting event. I didn’t exactly know what to do to entertain them, so I kept asking my mother, “What shall we do?” I remember being solidly scolded for asking such a stupid question when we were surrounded by swimming pools and tennis courts and bowling alleys. Mother’s point of view was understandable, given the environment of luxury, but I felt ill-at-ease entertaining and unable to cope.

My early dancing and acrobatics helped me athletically. By the fifth grade, I was fairly coordinated and had become proficient at team sports. Potomac was divided into two groups, the Reds and the Blues, which competed fiercely in games, races, volleyball, and other sports. I was on the Red team and was inclined to be bossy, a trait of which I was quite unaware until Miss Preisha—the gym teacher, on whom I had a crush—pulled me aside one day and told me she thought I might be elected captain of the Reds if I didn’t tell people what to do so much. Suddenly I could hear myself egging people on or giving orders. I took her advice and, miracle of miracles, it worked! I became captain. This small triumph gave me great secret satisfaction. I had had my first social success, a sign that something was working.

When I got to the eighth grade, I was sent to Miss Minnie Hawkes’s dancing school. My shyness made the class an ordeal to begin with, but adding to my torture was my height. I had grown tall—one of the tallest in the class—and had feet that were pretty big, too. During this time, my mother had a sudden fit of economy—or it may have been a genuine inability to shop—so I went off to dancing school in two hand-me-down dresses of Bis’s. I still remember that one was pale-peach velvet and the other was red silk. Since the back of the latter was thought to be too low, it was filled in with other material in a not inconspicuous patching job. To complete the ensemble, my governess bought me gold kid shoes. The other little girls had flat pumps and puff sleeves. My shoes were high heels—that’s all the store had in my size—adding at least two inches to my height. This odd apparition, of course, towered over the little boys, with the expectable disastrous results.

At about this period, we girls were all sending away for samples of soap and shampoo and trading them in the playground. Like my friends, I also collected photographs of favorite movie stars, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, whose movies I saw on weekends. I memorized—in German—“Falling in Love Again,” a song from
The Blue Angel
. And we voraciously read movie magazines.

Also like most young people, I had fantasies, but I recognized them even then as being just that. One was that it would be great to be a model. I once expressed this notion to my high-school friend Nancy White, who
returned me to reality by asking, “What of? Houses?” The other fantasy I suppose I shared with many children was that of being “famous”— maybe not a movie star (although I had wispy visions of entering a room like Dietrich)—but in some way being successful and having people know who I was. The strange thing is that after Watergate to some small extent the fantasy came true. I always found this hard to believe—both pleasurable and a little embarrassing—but the shadow of my mother’s enormous ego lent the whole thing a healthy reality check.

For high school, I attended Madeira, which, when I was a freshman, was located in Washington, near Dupont Circle. My father greatly admired Madeira’s founder, Lucy Madeira Wing, and was involved in helping her finance the school and move it to a beautiful new site in Virginia in my second year, when I became a five-day boarder, returning home on weekends. (Much later, my parents donated to the school the 178 acres they owned adjoining its original land.)

The Meyer girls were all automatically sent to Madeira. Miss Madeira had some advanced ideas and attempted to broaden our horizons. She believed, for instance, that God was a woman. Under the guise of Bible class, she attempted to enlighten us about poverty. She used her bully pulpit to try to mold us into some species of “Shavian Fabian,” as Rose Hyde called it. The school itself evidenced a very egalitarian spirit. Our uniforms helped obscure our differing financial backgrounds, and we generally didn’t know or care about anyone’s social standing. But, not surprisingly, we were rather narrowly cast. The Depression raged all around us at Madeira, but rarely hit home hard. A “Poverty Party” was held, with the proceeds donated to the Social Welfare Fund.

Miss Madeira ran a tight ship in a strict age. Her motto, which she often included in her talks to the school assemblies, was full of puritan drive: “Function in disaster. Finish in style.” Boarders were allowed to go into town to shop at one department store, though a chaperone had to stand guard in the shoe department because a man held your foot. One of my friends, Jean Rawlings, was invited to have lunch with her roommate and her roommate’s father. “Impossible,” said the housemother, “you can’t go out with your roommate’s father.” Apparently, several years before, a girl had run away with another student’s father.

Despite my penchant for law-abiding ways, I participated in one illegal activity. I joined a secret society, Vestes ad Mortuum, or Virgins Unto Death—an odd goal, I must say. In the middle of the night, we virgins arose, donned heavy rain-capes that Miss Madeira had procured from a French monastery, hiked a mile into the woods, and buried a pair of galoshes—the significance of which is unfortunately lost on me now. Vestes ad Mortuum flourished for several years after I graduated, until one envious girl who had not been tapped for membership squealed to Miss Madeira.

Dances were held at school about twice a year. Of course, no boys were allowed, so all the girls put on their evening dresses and corsages and danced with each other. The taller girls, who led, as I did, often found it difficult adjusting to male dancing partners in later life.

Social progress came slowly. I didn’t get around to boys for years. One New Year’s Eve during high school, when I was about sixteen, I went with my family to one of the famous dances given by Evalyn Walsh McLean. My brother was nice enough to cut in on me. Since I knew virtually no one, we danced on and on together. The lights finally went out, an electric sign lit up saying “Happy New Year,” “Auld Lang Syne” was sung, and my brother looked at me and said, “This is the last New Year’s Eve I’m ever going to spend with you.”

When I was about seventeen, I made a determined effort to learn how to appeal to the boys in the stag line at parties and dances. I noticed that if you laughed uproariously at the silliest joke and acted lively, as though you were having a wonderful time, the boys thought you were attractive and appealing. I applied this knowledge shamelessly. I faked it, but achieved a passing measure of popularity. So I gradually made my way through parties in Washington, at which I managed not to get “stuck” with one boy, which was the nightmare. I knew one or two of my brother’s friends from his Washington school days, and there were boys who occasionally took me to the parties and sometimes to movies. While at Vassar, I was invited to a few weekends at male colleges. But not until I got to the University of Chicago, years later, did I finally find real male friends and occasionally beaux, many of whom I frightened away through diffidence and not knowing how to cope.

I worked hard to be like everyone else at Madeira. I played on the varsity team in basketball, hockey, and track. I sang in the glee club. I was made to take piano lessons and practiced the same Beethoven sonata, the second movement of the
Appassionata
, every day for about a year. My schoolmates came to dread the never-changing clanging that emanated from my practice room, but I did learn something about musical structure in the process. I also appeared in a one-act melodrama produced by the Dramatic Association. My role was that of a handsome duke who was the cause of numerous deaths.

I was interested in journalism and joined the staff of the school magazine, appropriately called
Tatler
. Although we aimed to be “influential and stirring,” our editorials focused as much on the weather as on social issues. Many advertisements appeared as well, including one with a headline that read: “Give those developing curves a good home in a Redfence corselette.”

At Madeira, as an upperclassman, I also had my first certified success of a worldly kind. To my stunned amazement, I was elected president of the senior class. I had no idea of anything approximating general liking
and/or approval of me by others. It gave me inordinate pleasure, but it gave my father even more.

At school we were much more concerned with sports, friends, and vacations than with the real world. In fact, my interest in politics was nil through most of my early school years. I remember one debate during the presidential campaign of 1932, in which, following the Republican pattern of my parents, I spoke for Hoover. I couldn’t have known what I was talking about; I only knew that my father worked in the Hoover administration, and I believed in my father. My classmate Robin Kemper, daughter of James Kemper, a prominent Chicago Democrat, spoke for Roosevelt. It seemed almost automatic that we should all espouse our parents’ views.

Despite my successes in high school, I left Madeira with scant training for the life I was later to lead. I still felt fairly different and shy and believed I had only a few friends. Apparently my classmates didn’t see me the way I saw myself. My senior yearbook entry describes a girl known for her laugh and her manly stride. My class prophecy read: “Kay’s a Big Shot in the newspaper racket.” But I envisaged no such future for myself or, in fact, any specific future at all. Rather than creating my own way, what I was trying to do all the time was figure out how to adjust to whatever life I found. I would have preferred to be trailblazing, and of course adventurous and daring like Bis, but the poem chosen to accompany my class picture at Madeira reveals a different kind of person: “Those about her from her shall read the perfect ways of honor.” In other words, Goody Two-Shoes.

I
N
1921, my mother had met William L. Ward, one of the last of the great old-time enlightened political bosses. He pretty much ran Westchester County, where Mount Kisco was located, and he lured her into more active involvement in the county’s Republican politics. Bill Ward became her mentor, her supporter, her leader, and her close friend, and persuaded her that she should get more involved in civic affairs. Her passionate acceptance of this idea and espousal of public service, added to that of my father, meant that we grew up with the belief that no matter what you did professionally, you automatically had to think about public issues and give back, either in interest in your community or in public service—you had to care.

Soon Ward had created a county Recreation Commission, consisting of five women, with my mother as chairman. Under her leadership, the commission started summer camps for underprivileged children. She helped found choral groups all over the county, and she organized a big annual music festival for adults and children, which at first took place under
a huge tent. Then, largely at Mother’s instigation, Bill Ward built a County Center, which opened in May of 1930, a large, all-purpose auditorium in White Plains that is still in use. The center housed everything from plays and concerts to poultry and other animal shows. Over the years my mother presided at various events held there, including a performance by the Metropolitan Opera that coincided with the annual poultry show in the basement. To ensure that the roosters wouldn’t be crowing at the same time as the divas, she rigged up a system whereby cardboard was put in their cages so they couldn’t raise their heads to crow.

Mother also went to work in Republican politics, and with such vigor that by 1924 she became a delegate to the Republican Convention. Later, as she became even more involved, she traveled in support of her candidates and causes. We composed a poem during the 1924 campaign year: “Coolidge and Dawes, Coolidge and Dawes. When Mother’s away, they’re the cause.” When she was invited to state office and urged by women to run for Congress, she refused, on the grounds that “my husband and my family must come first.” I went with her to Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural in 1933 and watched Roosevelt come out in front of the Capitol and make his famous address. I distinctly recall Mother looking at the pathetic departing figure of Hoover contrasted with the triumphant Roosevelt, who appeared beaming on the platform just as a rain shower ended, the clouds parted, and a strong ray of sunshine illuminated his handsome, glowing face. She turned and said to me with remarkably little foresight, “Just wait. We’ll be back in four years.” Mother was an especially emotional Roosevelt-hater.