by Gore Vidal
“Oh, it’s all right now. I had a priest exorcise it. In Latin, too.” Evalyn pointed to a fantastic six-foot-high arrangement of purple orchids. “Alice went up to that thing and in her loudest voice said, ‘Good evening, Mrs. Wilson.’ ”
There were two hundred for dinner; then dancing until 1917 was safely done for. Blaise got Alice Longworth at dinner, as he often did at her request as well as his. Alice was aging well; and Blaise wondered what his life would have been like had they married, a thought that had occurred, briefly, to each of them but at different times. She was certainly the best of company, but then Frederika was far from dull. On the other hand, Alice was, forever, the President’s daughter. Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were simply pale precursors set in place by history, like so many John the Baptists, to prepare the world for the wonder of Theodore Roosevelt, soon to be president again, or so Alice—and Blaise—thought. Since anything that did not relate to the messianic mission was trivial, she was probably better off with the passive, amiable, hard-drinking Nick Longworth, a wealthy Ohio congressman, who was seated across the table next to an overdressed, plain woman who was, Alice said, Mrs. Warren Gamaliel Harding, “our Senator’s wife.” Alice made the “our” sound like an embarrassing possession, a dog that has just squatted at the center of a rare rug. “Nick has them to the house for poker. I am wonderfully tactful and very, very kind. It is said that she has one kidney, out of a possible two.”
“Usually, you’d only mention that if we’d just been served kidneys.”
Alice poked her fork into the mess on her plate. “Terrapin. See? I am very, very tactful nowadays because we need everybody, Father and I. Of course she could have only one terrapin, located in the third chin.”
“I think she can hear you.” Mrs. Harding’s ice-blue eyes were fixed without fondness on Alice while Nick, ever the courtier, murmured in her ear.
The dinner was grand, as all McLean occasions were. Thus far, Ned was not yet drunk; and Evalyn was in her element. It was said that she was even richer than Ned, from Western gold mines. Blaise found her a relief from the other hard-panners, as the Western new rich were called. Unlike the other ladies, she revelled in her low birth and vast income; bought more diamonds than anyone since Marie Antoinette and, in general, created euphoria all about her. Who else would have lit up their palace so splendidly when the lights were dimmed throughout the country and Broadway’s Great White Way switched off?
“Where’s Caroline?”
“At the other table, I think.” Blaise had caught a glimpse of his sister in deep conversation with Ned McLean’s aunt, wife to what had been the czarist Russian ambassador, now ambassador no more. Blaise hoped that Caroline would remember that she was a publisher and collect news.
“Is it true she’s acted in a photo-play?” Alice looked, suddenly, more jealous than sardonic.
“It was just a joke, made by Mr. Hearst.”
“Hearst!” That changed the subject for good. “Father still thinks he’s the most dangerous man in the country, and a German spy.”
“I can’t see what he could spy on, outside the Ziegfeld Follies.”
Alice moved yet again; this time for scandal’s jugular. “Have you met her?”
Blaise nodded. It seemed that everyone was interested in the Chief’s “secret” love, Marion Davies. “She’s very young, very blond. She stammers, and she calls him ‘Pops.’ ”
Alice roared; then began to stammer “Pops” over and over again until the removal of the terrapin allowed Blaise to address his other dinner partner.
After dinner, more guests arrived; and an orchestra played in the ballroom. As Blaise watched the dancers, he was aware that someone had sat down beside him in the next chair. It was the British ambassador, Cecil Spring Rice, looking old and tired.
“Dear Blaise. It is hard to believe that there’s a war going on.”
“Half a world away is … half a world away. The whole thing still seems unreal to me, and I’m really French, you know.” Blaise assumed that he had made so untrue a confession in order to console the Englishman for the blood-letting. Certainly the sons of the British ruling class were being used to manure the fields of France; and for what harvest?
“This is to be my last New Year’s in Washington. So I came here to see the show for one last time.”
Blaise knew that there had been problems between Spring Rice and the Lords Reading and Northcliffe, recently sent over by the British government to represent the politicians; also, Spring Rice’s long friendship with Roosevelt and Lodge did not recommend him to the Wilsons. “When do you go?”
Spring Rice shrugged. “When they tell me to. I assume sometime in April when I shall be sixty and get my pension. How it’s changed since I was young.…” He was in an elegiac mood. “I came here first as a very young secretary. We thought this a minor capital then. Buenos Aires was more desirable, more worldly. Now … look.”
Blaise looked at the Hope Diamond as it swung back and forth like the pendulum to some highly sinister clock.
“The thing has now come round to us.” Blaise agreed. “But I’m not so sure that we’ll know what to do with—all the world.”
“You’ll think of something, I’m sure. Anyway, you are not Germany.” Spring Rice frowned. “But then Germany is not Germany anymore either. I used to think one could generalize, in a vague way, about a nation, a people, a tribe. But one cannot. The Germany of my youth was the most civilized country in the world, and my German colleagues the most intelligent and professional. Then …”
“The Huns?”
“There are Huns in every country, I am convinced. The military—the Huns—took over my Germany.”
“Why didn’t your Huns take over your empire?”
“We’re far too lazy for that sort of thing. Sloth has always saved England from itself.”
“Will it save us?” Blaise had noted, with some amazement, the ease with which the Administration had been able to whip up so much hatred in the American people. Although there was nothing that Blaise did not know about the manipulation of public opinion, even he had been startled by the efficiency and speed with which the likes of George Creel had managed to demonize all things German. If this could be done so rapidly with a people whose relatives compromised a sizable minority of the American people, it could be done again and again by any administration, and for any purpose.
“You are not a slothful nor a lazy people.” Spring Rice was precise. “You are also more susceptible than we to—storms of emotion.”
“Just what I was thinking. My sister has been in Hollywood, where they are now making photo-plays about bestial Huns, and millions of people go see those moving pictures, and believe what they see.”
“As,” Spring Rice smiled, “they believe my dispatches and your editorials.”
“But we have some shame, don’t we?”
The Ambassador nodded. “We do. But I am never sure about those who govern us. The President did me the courtesy of explaining what it is he does.”
“Tell me. I’ve never known.”
“Apparently, he is a barometer in human form. He registers precisely the popular mood. Then, when it is no longer—variable?—he acts in accordance with that mood.”
“Which you and I and the photo-plays have created for him.”
“We make some of the weather. But not all. Actually, he seems to me much more like a swimmer, trying to avoid one wave from crashing over him while trying to find another one, which he can ride to shore.”
“You preferred Roosevelt. I know.” Blaise quickly apologized for the gaffe. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I heard nothing but the music, dear Blaise, and saw nothing but my beloved wife over there, teaching a senator the fox-trot.”
“What you have done—do for England!”
“Only my all. You know,” Spring Rice was, for an instant, serious, “the President—and Colonel House, his Buckingham—believes that there should be
a post-war league—a covenant—of all countries, to keep the peace.”
“So do I. So does Taft, who gave him the idea.”
“So, I suppose, do I. But then I’m a barometer, too, an old infirm foreign barometer, admittedly, but I can usually predict the weather in these parts—at least the storms, when I—the barometer—start falling. These people, your people, will never join such an organization.”
Blaise was surprised. After all, it was the received opinion of those who led the state and molded public opinion that such an organization was highly desirable. If they could so easily make the people hate all things German, they could certainly make them love a bureaucratic means of forever keeping peace. “I see no obstacle. Republicans are even more in favor of a league than Democrats.”
“It won’t work like that. Americans are too used to going alone in the world. You’re also at the start of your own empire, and no rising empire ever wants to commit itself to peace when there are still so many profitable wars to fight.”
“You astonish me.”
Caroline and a lean, dark blue-eyed man approached them. Although introductions were made, Blaise did not hear the man’s name. Plainly, he was not from Washington. Caroline was splendid, all in gold; and looked a decade younger than she had before the trip to California, where, on Creel’s instructions, she had excited the motion-picture business to even greater, if possible, propaganda efforts. Spring Rice was led away by Ned McLean, whose sobriety was now drawing to a close, along with the year.
“I’ve heard so much about you.” The accent was Boston Irish. This was the sort of thing one met in California, thought Blaise, censoriously. He wondered if Caroline was having an affair with him.
“Well, I’ve heard nothing about you.” Blaise radiated what he hoped was charm. “But that’s Caroline’s fault.”
“Your fault,” said Caroline. “We don’t see each other outside the office.”
“We don’t see each other in the office either.” Blaise was genial. “There is an editor who keeps us apart. What are you doing here?”
“Visiting Caroline.” Yes, this was her lover. Women, Blaise noted, not for the first time, had no taste in men. Of course, the Irishman was younger than she, and, happily, their French upbringing had released them from that powerful American taboo, the monster older woman who, like a vampire, drains—dissipates—the rare essence of innocent young manhood. French women, in bed as well as in the market, valued les primeurs. “Timothy has never been to Washington before. So I wanted to show him a typical party.”
“It’s just like DeMille,” said Timothy.
“DeMille who?” asked Blaise.
At that moment, all the lights in the ballroom went out. Then one end of the room was lit up with a thousand red, white and blue lights that spelled out “Good Luck to the Allies in 1918.” There was cheering. The orchestra played “Auld Lang Syne.” There was loud singing. Blaise kissed Caroline’s cheek, and shook Timothy’s hand. Caroline then kissed Timothy on the lips. “I am,” she said to Blaise, through all the noise of paper-crackers and band music, “going to make a movie in 1918.”
Then the lights came on again and the dancing started up. Blaise turned to Caroline, who was definitely having an affair with Timothy. “I’m getting deaf,” he said. “I thought you said you were going to make a movie in 1918.”
“I did, Blaise. I am.” Caroline and Timothy joined the dancers. Frederika appeared for Blaise to embrace. “His name,” said Frederika, omitting the Happy New Year, “is Timothy X. Farrell. He directs—or is it conducts?—photo-plays.”
“I had hoped he was a chauffeur,” said Blaise, in a good mood. “Anyway, whatever Hearst does, she does. Perhaps she found him in the chorus of the Follies.”
“Good for her, I say. She was bored.” Frederika took a glass of champagne from a waiter.
“She isn’t bored now.” Then Blaise and Frederika began the new year with a waltz.
FOUR
1
For Caroline, love had always meant—if anything—separation. In the golden days of her affair with Burden, she was allowed to see him only on Sundays in Washington; with rare excursions elsewhere, to exotic river cities like St. Louis, and to the wonderful blankness of hotel rooms. She had not needed Burden—or anyone—every day. She had had a full life, beginning with her seven years’ war against Blaise for her share of the Sanford inheritance. Although Blaise had won the war in the sense that she had received her capital when she was twenty-seven and not, as their father’s will required, twenty-one, she had scored the greater victory by acquiring a moribund Washington newspaper and making a success of it, largely because Blaise had always wanted to be a publisher, like his friend and sometime employer Hearst. But it was Caroline not Blaise who had re-created the Washington Tribune. Finally, at a peace conference in exotic St. Louis, she had allowed him to buy into the paper while she kept control.
But control of what? she wondered, as she carefully crossed the icy sidewalk in front of Henry Adams’s Romanesque villa across from the Byzantine-classical St. John’s Church, whose gilded cupola mocked the demure primness of Lafayette Park. Whatever urge that she might have had for political power had been entirely extinguished by her years in Washington. Seen close to, the rulers of the country were no different from the ruled, or if they were, she could not tell the difference. Money mattered, and nothing else. For anyone who had been brought up in a nation whose most famous play was called The Miser, this was more agreeable than not, particularly if one had enough of what mattered. The problem now was what to do with what remained of her life. Tim, as she now somewhat self-consciously called Farrell, had entered her orderly life like a sudden high wind at a Newport picnic, and everything was in a state of disorder.
In Los Angeles, their days were spent in the surprisingly small barn-like buildings where photo-plays were created at a very rapid rate; and their nights at early “supper,” as it was called in California, with the world-famous men and women who were the stars, each tinier than the other; only their large heads in proportion to their small bodies demonstrated some obscure Darwinian principle that when evolution required movie stars those best adapted to the screen—large heads atop small neat bodies—would be ready to make the journey to Southern California “because there’s sun all year round,” the town proclaimed. Actually, there was fog almost every morning and a thousand other places would have been more suitable except for one crucial detail—the Mexican border was only a hundred miles away. Since all the moving-picture makers in California were using equipment developed by that protean genius Edison, and since none acknowledged his patents, the village was filled with hard-eyed detectives, waiting to catch a glimpse of something called the Latham Loop, which, if found in use, could lead to gunfire and endless lawsuits.
Caroline had enjoyed the frontier life. She had also enjoyed her first affair in many years. Although Irish and often drunk, Tim was, to use the popular new verb, enthused by sex, and Caroline felt herself grow younger by the day. She also never ceased to ache in every joint, because, as Héloise wisely and proudly said, “you are at last using all your muscles.” Caroline felt like a wrestler in training as she and Tim tried to make as little noise as possible in the Garden Court Apartments, from which—except for them—all movie people had been excluded by the Iowan management. Tim explained to Caroline that most of Hollywood’s residents were peaceful retired Middle Western farm folk who were stunned to find their village suddenly overwhelmed by beauty and vice, by Jews and process-servers.
Tim had gone back to California right after the New Year. In due course, Caroline would join him, but for now she remained in Washington. Hearst had already proposed that she buy into his new venture, Cosmopolitan Pictures, currently making movies in his own New York studio at Second Avenue and 127th Street. But Caroline was wary of Hearst. For one thing, he could absorb her too easily; for another, she and Blaise had been startled to learn that Hearst was negotiating to buy the Washington Time
s in order to do for it what she had done for the Tribune. Blaise had agreed with her that they should keep Hearst out of Washington even if it meant buying the Times themselves, and merging it with the Tribune. Finally, if Caroline was to fulfill her war-time task, Southern California was the place to be. Also, that was where Tim was. Seize the day, as Burden had liked to joke when their bodies were new to one another.
Henry Adams had always been of movie-star size but now, with age, he was almost no longer present in the room. The large bald bearded head seemed unattached as it floated close to the floor in the study that always smelled of lilies and roses no matter what the season. It was here, thought Caroline, as they embraced, her Washington life had begun; now was it here that it would end? Was she fated to end her days at the other end of the United States, wearing puttees and riding breeches, shouting orders through a megaphone at tiny actors, once the Santa Monica fog had finally burned away?
“I’m early.”
“I’m late. Far too late.” Adams helped her to a chair beside the fire. All in gray, Aileen Tone greeted her softly. It was Caroline’s impression that Adams was kept like some rare fragile Fabergé egg in a carefully arranged, all-cushioned and heated, nest: would the egg then hatch? Yes, if death was the final hatching.
“Theodore, Rex that was, is in the town. But why do I tell you when you are the town.”
“The voice has been heard, it’s true. Is he coming to lunch?”
“Here? Oh, no. I have standards, not high, I confess, except in the case of nieces, but certain big fish can never make it up the river to me. She comes, though. My eldest niece, Edith, and daughter Alice.”
“I like her—or ‘she.’ ” It was taken by some as a sign of Roosevelt’s fragile health that his wife Edith had come to Washington with him in the wake of the President’s Fourteen Points (four more than God’s, was the current joke) that had been submitted to the Congress. The principal point involved a league of all the nations that would, at the first sign of stress between any of its members, soothe and adjudicate and make war unthinkable.