by Nora Ephron
Pat Loud offers a number of other explanations as to why her family agreed to Gilbert’s proposal—the one she seems to believe most firmly is that anyone would have. But she is less sure about why the reaction to the show was so enormous. “What nerve have we touched?” she asks at one point. “I would like to know; I would really like to know.” I suspect I know. I think the American public has an almost insatiable need to feel superior to people who appear to have everything, and the Louds were the perfect vehicle to fill that need. There they were, a beautiful family with a beautiful house with a beautiful pool, and one son was a homosexual, the rest of the children lolled about, uninterested in anything, and the marriage was breaking up. All of it was on television, in cinéma vérité—a medium that at its best (I’m thinking of the Maysleses’ Salesman and the Canadian Film Board’s Lonely Boy and The Most) has always tended to specialize in a certain amount of implicit condescension.
It is on the subject of the making of the series that Pat Loud is most interesting. Cinéma vérité filmmakers have always insisted that after a time, their subjects forget the cameras are there, but as Pat Loud makes clear, it’s just not possible. “You can’t forget the camera,” she writes, “and everybody’s instinct is to try and look as good as possible for it, all the time, and to keep kind of snapping along being active, eager, cheery, and productive. Out go those moments when you’re just in a kind of nothing period…. You don’t realize how many of those you have until you’re trying not to have them…. And what you also don’t realize is that you have to have them—they’re like REM sleep.”
Ultimately, Pat Loud seems to have come to believe that she owed more to the filmmakers than she did to herself or her husband; any concept of dignity or privacy she may have had evaporated in the face of pressure from them. Again she nibbles around the edges of this, almost but not quite getting it, but the suggestions of what happened are there: the illiterate Californians trying to impress the erudite Easterners; the boring, slothful family attempting to come up with a dramatic episode to justify all that footage; the woman who had always tried to please men—first her father, then her husband—now transferring it all to Craig Gilbert.
And when, in the course of events, Pat Loud decided she wanted a divorce, Craig Gilbert convinced her that she owed it to him, to all of them, to do it on the air. “If I decided to divorce during the filming,” Mrs. Loud says Gilbert told her, “I must be honest enough to do it openly and not confuse the issue further by refusing to allow it to be shot.” Again she almost has it, almost sees how she was conned, and then falls into utter nonsense. “Couldn’t it be,” she asks, “that since circumstance and fate had put me in a position to rip away the curtain of hypocrisy, that maybe, just maybe, we could help other families face their problems more honestly?” And then she switches gears, and makes sense again: “A psychiatrist told a friend of mine recently that in his experience he’d found that there is almost always a third force present when divorce finally happens. The miserable marriage can wobble on for years on end, until something or somebody comes along and pushes one of the people over the brink…. It’s usually another man … or another woman … or possibly a supportive psychiatrist; in my case, it was a whole production staff and a camera crew….”
And so the marriage and the television series ended, and along came the notoriety. And now there is the book, and there will be more: more talk shows, more interviews. It all seems sad; there is no way to read this book and not feel that this bumbling woman is way over her head. She has made a fool of herself on television, and now she is making a fool of herself in print. She does not understand that it is just as hard to be honest successfully as it is to lie successfully. And now, God help her, she has moved to New York. She will get a job, she tells us at the end of the book, and perhaps she will be able to fulfill her fantasy. Here is Pat Loud’s last fantasy. She’s at this swell New York cocktail party, “exchanging terribly New York in-type gossip about who’s backing what new play and who got how much for the paperback rights to Philip Roth’s latest,” and there is this man who takes her to dinner, and then to bed, and they have a wonderful affair. “I’m not saying he would solve everything, or pick up the pieces, or even make me happy. Nor is he as important as a good job. But the nice thing about fantasies is that you don’t have to explain them to anybody. They are absolutely free.” There she goes again, almost making sense, talking about the importance of work, and the need not to look to anyone for the solution of her problems, and then she blows it all. “They are absolutely free.” That’s the thing about fantasies. They’re not absolutely free. Sometimes you pay dearly for them. Which is something Pat Loud ought to have learned by now. Will she ever?
—March 1974
Julie Nixon Eisenhower: The Littlest Nixon
SHE COMES DOWN the aisle, and the clothes are just right, Kimberly-knitted to the knee, and she walks in step with the government official, who happens to be H.E.W. Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and her face is perfect, not smiling, mind you—this is too serious an event for that—but bright, intent, as if she is absolutely fascinated by what he is saying. Perhaps she actually is. They take their places on the platform of the Right to Read Conference at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, and he speaks and she speaks and the director of Right to Read speaks. Throughout she listens raptly, smiles on cue, laughs a split second after the audience laughs. Perhaps she is actually amused. On the way out, she says she hopes she will be able to obtain a copy of the speech she has just sat through. Perhaps she actually thought it was interesting. There is no way to know. No way to break through. She has it all down perfectly. She was raised for this, raised to cut ribbons, and now that it has all gone sour, it turns out that she has been raised to deal with that, too.
The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility—and as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying. They will tell you that she is approachable, which is true, and that she is open, which is not. Primarily they find her moving. “There is something about a spirited and charming daughter speaking up for her father in his darkest hour that is irresistibly appealing to all but the most cynical.” That from the Daily News. And this from NBC’s Barbara Walters, signing off after Julie’s last appearance on the Today show: “I think that no matter how people feel about your father, they’re always very impressed to see a daughter defend her father that way.”
There is something very moving about Julie Nixon Eisenhower—but it is not Julie Nixon Eisenhower. It is the idea of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, essence of daughter, a better daughter than any of us will ever be; it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six. This idea is apparently so overwhelming in its appeal that some Washington reporters go so far as to say that Julie doesn’t seem like a Nixon at all—a remark so patently absurd as to make one conclude either that they haven’t heard a word she is saying or that they have been around Nixon so long they don’t recognize a chocolate-covered spider when they see one.
I should point out before going any further that I have a special interest in presidents’ daughters, having spent a good thirty minutes in my youth wanting to be Margaret Truman. And even back then, I knew it was not a perfect existence—Secret Service men trailing you everywhere, life in a fishbowl, and so forth. Still, whatever the drawbacks, it seemed clear that if you were the president’s daughter, you at least got to date a lot. The other attraction to the fantasy, I suppose, had to do with the fact that the role of the president’s daughter is the closest thing there is in America to being a princess, the closest thing to having stature and privilege purely as a result of an accident of birth. It is one of life’s little jokes that both America and Britain have suffered through remarkably similar princesses in recent years: the Johnson
girls, the Nixon girls, and Princess Anne are all drab, dull young women who have managed to acquire enough poise and good grooming to get through the public events their parents do not have time to attend.
Julie and Tricia were born just as their father was beginning public life. They grew up in Washington as congressman’s daughters, senator’s daughters, and vice president’s daughters. Then they moved to California to be gubernatorial candidate’s daughters, and later to New York to be presidential contender’s daughters. After graduating from the Chapin School, Tricia went on to Finch College, Julie to Smith. There she began dating, and married—not a commoner, but a president’s grandson. (David Eisenhower, with his endless tables of batting averages and illogical articles on the American left, is the perfect Nixon son-in-law. Still, he is not stupid. Last summer, after working as a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin, he was asked if he had any observations on the American press. “Yes,” he reportedly said. “Journalists aren’t nearly as interesting as they think they are.”)
Marriage—which might logically have been expected to move Julie into a more removed and private existence—has instead strengthened and intensified her family connections and political role. During college, the Eisenhowers spent their summer vacations in a third-floor suite at the White House and took time off from school to campaign for Nixon’s re-election. These days, they see Julie’s parents several times a week; the Nixons often sneak off to eat with Julie and David in the $125,000 two-bedroom Bethesda home that Bebe Rebozo bought and rented to the Eisenhowers, presumably at well below its market price.
A few months ago, Julie took a full-time job at $10,000 a year at Curtis Publishing, where she is assistant editorial director of children’s magazines and assistant editor of The Saturday Evening Post. She announced at the time that the children’s magazine field attracted her because it would be impossible for her, as the president’s daughter, to write for adult magazines on sensitive political subjects. An upcoming article for The Saturday Evening Post, however, while hardly on anything sensitive or political, is nonetheless on a topic that could not be more calculated to draw attention to her position: it is a profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who is now eighty-nine and in the seventy-third year of her career as a president’s daughter.
Julie, of course, is nothing like Alice Roosevelt, or any of the other flibbertigibbet presidents’ daughters in the history of this country. In the months since the Watergate hearings began, she has become her father’s principal defender, his First Lady in practice if not in fact. “It was something I took on myself,” she said. “I just thought I had a story to tell, that there were certain points I could make, and I was very eager to do it. The idea that my father has to hide behind anyone’s skirts is of course ludicrous.” In any case, Julie’s skirts were the only ones available: Pat Nixon is uncomfortable in press and television interviews, and Tricia is in New York. (Washington rumor has it that her husband, Edward Cox, and the president do not get on.) “And that leaves me,” said Julie.
It has left her to make two appearances on the Today show, a television hookup with the BBC, a guest shot on Jack Paar’s show. She has survived Kandy Stroud of Women’s Wear Daily and lunch with Helen Thomas of the U.P.I. and Fran Lewine of the A.P. Odd little personal details about the president have slipped out during these interviews—whether deliberately or not. She has said that her father sometimes doesn’t feel like getting up in the morning, that he took the role of devil’s advocate in a family discussion on whether he should resign, that he often sits alone at night upstairs in the White House playing the piano. During her last appearance with Barbara Walters, whose interviews with her have been dazzling, she even came up with a sinister-influence theory of her own to explain everything: “Sometimes I think we were born under an unlucky star.”
Her performances are always calm and professional and poised, her revelations just titillating enough, and after all, she’s only a girl—and the combination of these has tended to draw attention away from the substantive things she is saying and the way she is saying them. Julie Eisenhower has developed—or been coached in—three basic approaches to answering questions. The first is not to answer the question at all. During her BBC appearance, an American woman living in England phoned in to say, “I would like Mrs. Eisenhower to know that her father’s actions have made our position abroad untenable … it would be better if he came forward and answered questions himself instead of putting you in his place.” Julie replied, “I’d like to ask … how she thinks my father can answer more on Watergate without pointing the finger at people who have not been indicted.” This answer—in addition to skirting the question and making Nixon look like a man whose sole thought is of the Constitution—utterly overlooks the fact that almost everyone connected with Watergate has been called to testify, a good many have been indicted, and some have even been convicted.
The second approach is to point to the bright side. Thus, when she is asked about Watergate, she talks instead of her father’s successes with China, Russia, and the Middle East crisis. When she is asked about the number of presidential appointees who have been forced to resign, she mentions Henry Kissinger and Ron Ziegler, whom she once called “a man of great integrity.” “And I’d go beyond that,” she said once. “I’d say that many of these people we’re talking about, these aides, were great Americans, really devoted to their country, and they didn’t make any money on Watergate, they didn’t do anything for personal gain. They made mistakes, errors in judgment. I don’t think they’re evil men.”
The third, and most classic, of Mrs. Eisenhower’s techniques is simply to put the blame elsewhere—on the press. She combines the Middle American why-doesn’t-the-press-ever-print-good-news theme with good old-fashioned Nixon paranoia. I spoke with her the other day for five minutes, and she spent most of that time complaining that her mother had met the day before with a group from the Conference on the Role of Women in the Economy, and not one word about it had been printed in the papers. “Instead we get all these negative things,” she said. When she was asked recently what she thought of Barry Goldwater’s charge that her father’s credibility was at an all-time low, she replied: “Barry Goldwater also had a press conference during this whole period … and he said that the press were hounds of destruction. I don’t think he meant all of the press, but, um, Goldwater is a quotable man, isn’t he? I didn’t hear that on the networks. But when he says [my father’s] credibility is at an all-time low, that is on the networks.”
The only questions that stump Julie Eisenhower at all are the ones that concern her father’s personality. She has said that she is sick of telling reporters what a warm, human person he is—a fact that fortunately has not stopped reporters from pressing her to give examples. One story she produced recently to show what a card her father can be in his off moments concerned the time her husband, David, took the wheel of Bebe Rebozo’s yacht—and the president, in response, appeared on deck wearing not one but two life preservers. “He is quite a practical joker,” she said on another occasion. “He likes to tease and he likes to plan surprises when he can. Things like getting birthday candles for a cake that don’t blow out. You know, all nice and lit and you sit there huffing and puffing and they don’t go out…. Things like that.”
There is no point in dwelling too heavily on the implications of a daughter who has managed to play a larger role in her father’s life than his wife seems to. And there is also no point in wondering what is going to happen to Julie Eisenhower’s view of her father if the fall actually comes. It is safe to say that breeding will win out, and all the years of growing up in that family will protect her from any insight at all, will lead her to conclude that he was quite simply done in by malicious, unpatriotic forces. What is clear, though, is that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is fighting for herself and her position as hard as she is fighting for her father and his. She once said that if her father was forced out of office, she would “just fold up and wither and fall away.�
�� What is more likely is that she will deal with that, too, vanish for a couple of years, and then crop up in politics again. That, after all, is what Nixons do, and that, in the end, is all she is.
—December 1973
Lisbeth Salander: The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut
THERE WAS A tap at the door at five in the morning. She woke up. Shit. Now what? She’d fallen asleep with her Palm Tungsten T3 in her hand. It would take only a moment to smash it against the wall and shove the battery up the nose of whoever was out there annoying her. She went to the door.
“I know you’re home,” he said.
Kalle fucking Blomkvist.
She tried to remember whether she was speaking to him or not. Probably not. She tried to remember why. No one knew why. It was undoubtedly because she’d been in a bad mood at some point. Lisbeth Salander was entitled to her bad moods on account of her miserable childhood and her tiny breasts, but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an ax.
Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what. Etc.
“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”
He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.